Bot-S: The Complete Works of Plato

Both are dragged out of their
course by the furious impulses of desire. In the end something is conceded to the
desires, after they have been finally humbled and overpowered. And yet the way of
philosophy, or perfect love of the unseen, is total abstinence from bodily delights. ‘But
all men cannot receive this saying’: in the lower life of ambition they may be taken off
their guard and stoop to folly unawares, and then, although they do not attain to the
highest bliss, yet if they have once conquered they may be happy enough.
The language of the Meno and the Phaedo as well as of the Phaedrus seems to show
that at one time of his life Plato was quite serious in maintaining a former state of
existence. His mission was to realize the abstract; in that, all good and truth, all the
hopes of this and another life seemed to centre. To him abstractions, as we call them,
were another kind of knowledge—an inner and unseen world, which seemed to exist far
more truly than the fleeting objects of sense which were without him. When we are once
able to imagine the intense power which abstract ideas exercised over the mind of Plato,
we see that there was no more difficulty to him in realizing the eternal existence of them
and of the human minds which were associated with them, in the past and future than in
the present. The difficulty was not how they could exist, but how they could fail to exist.
In the attempt to regain this ‘saving’ knowledge of the ideas, the sense was found to be
as great an enemy as the desires; and hence two things which to us seem quite distinct
are inextricably blended in the representation of Plato.
Thus far we may believe that Plato was serious in his conception of the soul as a motive
power, in his reminiscence of a former state of being, in his elevation of the reason over
sense and passion, and perhaps in his doctrine of transmigration. Was he equally serious
in the rest? For example, are we to attribute his tripartite division of the soul to the
gods? Or is this merely assigned to them by way of parallelism with men? The latter is
the more probable; for the horses of the gods are both white, i.e. their every impulse is
in harmony with reason; their dualism, on the other hand, only carries out the figure of
the chariot. Is he serious, again, in regarding love as ‘a madness’? That seems to arise
out of the antithesis to the former conception of love. At the same time he appears to
intimate here, as in the Ion, Apology, Meno, and elsewhere, that there is a faculty in
man, whether to be termed in modern language genius, or inspiration, or imagination,
or idealism, or communion with God, which cannot be reduced to rule and measure.
Perhaps, too, he is ironically repeating the common language of mankind about
philosophy, and is turning their jest into a sort of earnest. (Compare Phaedo, Symp.) Or
is he serious in holding that each soul bears the character of a god? He may have had
no other account to give of the differences of human characters to which he afterwards
refers. Or, again, in his absurd derivation of mantike and oionistike and imeros (compare
Cratylus)? It is characteristic of the irony of Socrates to mix up sense and nonsense in
such a way that no exact line can be drawn between them. And allegory helps to
increase this sort of confusion.
As is often the case in the parables and prophecies of Scripture, the meaning is allowed
to break through the figure, and the details are not always consistent. When the
charioteers and their steeds stand upon the dome of heaven they behold the intangible
invisible essences which are not objects of sight. This is because the force of language
can no further go. Nor can we dwell much on the circumstance, that at the completion
of ten thousand years all are to return to the place from whence they came; because he
represents their return as dependent on their own good conduct in the successive
stages of existence. Nor again can we attribute anything to the accidental inference
which would also follow, that even a tyrant may live righteously in the condition of life
to which fate has called him (‘he aiblins might, I dinna ken’). But to suppose this would
be at variance with Plato himself and with Greek notions generally. He is much more
serious in distinguishing men from animals by their recognition of the universal which
they have known in a former state, and in denying that this gift of reason can ever be
obliterated or lost. In the language of some modern theologians he might be said to
maintain the ‘final perseverance’ of those who have entered on their pilgrim’s progress.
Other intimations of a ‘metaphysic’ or ‘theology’ of the future may also be discerned in
him: (1) The moderate predestinarianism which here, as in the Republic, acknowledges
the element of chance in human life, and yet asserts the freedom and responsibility of
man; (2) The recognition of a moral as well as an intellectual principle in man under the
image of an immortal steed; (3) The notion that the divine nature exists by the
contemplation of ideas of virtue and justice—or, in other words, the assertion of the
essentially moral nature of God; (4) Again, there is the hint that human life is a life of
aspiration only, and that the true ideal is not to be found in art; (5) There occurs the first
trace of the distinction between necessary and contingent matter; (6) The conception of
the soul itself as the motive power and reason of the universe.
The conception of the philosopher, or the philosopher and lover in one, as a sort of
madman, may be compared with the Republic and Theaetetus, in both of which the
philosopher is regarded as a stranger and monster upon the earth. The whole myth, like
the other myths of Plato, describes in a figure things which are beyond the range of
human faculties, or inaccessible to the knowledge of the age. That philosophy should be
represented as the inspiration of love is a conception that has already become familiar
to us in the Symposium, and is the expression partly of Plato’s enthusiasm for the idea,
and is also an indication of the real power exercised by the passion of friendship over
the mind of the Greek. The master in the art of love knew that there was a mystery in
these feelings and their associations, and especially in the contrast of the sensible and
permanent which is afforded by them; and he sought to explain this, as he explained
universal ideas, by a reference to a former state of existence. The capriciousness of love
is also derived by him from an attachment to some god in a former world. The singular
remark that the beloved is more affected than the lover at the final consummation of
their love, seems likewise to hint at a psychological truth.
It is difficult to exhaust the meanings of a work like the Phaedrus, which indicates so
much more than it expresses; and is full of inconsistencies and ambiguities which were
not perceived by Plato himself. For example, when he is speaking of the soul does he
mean the human or the divine soul? and are they both equally self-moving and
constructed on the same threefold principle? We should certainly be disposed to reply
that the self-motive is to be attributed to God only; and on the other hand that the
appetitive and passionate elements have no place in His nature. So we should infer from
the reason of the thing, but there is no indication in Plato’s own writings that this was
his meaning. Or, again, when he explains the different characters of men by referring
them back to the nature of the God whom they served in a former state of existence, we
are inclined to ask whether he is serious: Is he not rather using a mythological figure,
here as elsewhere, to draw a veil over things which are beyond the limits of mortal
knowledge? Once more, in speaking of beauty is he really thinking of some external
form such as might have been expressed in the works of Phidias or Praxiteles; and not
rather of an imaginary beauty, of a sort which extinguishes rather than stimulates vulgar
love,—a heavenly beauty like that which flashed from time to time before the eyes of
Dante or Bunyan? Surely the latter. But it would be idle to reconcile all the details of the
passage: it is a picture, not a system, and a picture which is for the greater part an
allegory, and an allegory which allows the meaning to come through. The image of the
charioteer and his steeds is placed side by side with the absolute forms of justice,
temperance, and the like, which are abstract ideas only, and which are seen with the eye
of the soul in her heavenly journey. The first impression of such a passage, in which no
attempt is made to separate the substance from the form, is far truer than an elaborate
philosophical analysis.
It is too often forgotten that the whole of the second discourse of Socrates is only an
allegory, or figure of speech. For this reason, it is unnecessary to enquire whether the
love of which Plato speaks is the love of men or of women. It is really a general idea
which includes both, and in which the sensual element, though not wholly eradicated, is
reduced to order and measure. We must not attribute a meaning to every fanciful detail.
Nor is there any need to call up revolting associations, which as a matter of good taste
should be banished, and which were far enough away from the mind of Plato. These and
similar passages should be interpreted by the Laws. Nor is there anything in the
Symposium, or in the Charmides, in reality inconsistent with the sterner rule which Plato
lays down in the Laws. At the same time it is not to be denied that love and philosophy
are described by Socrates in figures of speech which would not be used in Christian
times; or that nameless vices were prevalent at Athens and in other Greek cities; or that
friendships between men were a more sacred tie, and had a more important social and
educational influence than among ourselves. (See note on Symposium.)
In the Phaedrus, as well as in the Symposium, there are two kinds of love, a lower and a
higher, the one answering to the natural wants of the animal, the other rising above
them and contemplating with religious awe the forms of justice, temperance, holiness,
yet finding them also ‘too dazzling bright for mortal eye,’ and shrinking from them in
amazement. The opposition between these two kinds of love may be compared to the
opposition between the flesh and the spirit in the Epistles of St. Paul. It would be
unmeaning to suppose that Plato, in describing the spiritual combat, in which the
rational soul is finally victor and master of both the steeds, condescends to allow any
indulgence of unnatural lusts.
Two other thoughts about love are suggested by this passage. First of all, love is
represented here, as in the Symposium, as one of the great powers of nature, which
takes many forms and two principal ones, having a predominant influence over the lives
of men. And these two, though opposed, are not absolutely separated the one from the
other. Plato, with his great knowledge of human nature, was well aware how easily one
is transformed into the other, or how soon the noble but fleeting aspiration may return
into the nature of the animal, while the lower instinct which is latent always remains. The
intermediate sentimentalism, which has exercised so great an influence on the literature
of modern Europe, had no place in the classical times of Hellas; the higher love, of which
Plato speaks, is the subject, not of poetry or fiction, but of philosophy.
Secondly, there seems to be indicated a natural yearning of the human mind that the
great ideas of justice, temperance, wisdom, should be expressed in some form of visible
beauty, like the absolute purity and goodness which Christian art has sought to realize
in the person of the Madonna. But although human nature has often attempted to
represent outwardly what can be only ‘spiritually discerned,’ men feel that in pictures
and images, whether painted or carved, or described in words only, we have not the
substance but the shadow of the truth which is in heaven. There is no reason to suppose
that in the fairest works of Greek art, Plato ever conceived himself to behold an image,
however faint, of ideal truths. ‘Not in that way was wisdom seen.’
We may now pass on to the second part of the Dialogue, which is a criticism on the first.
Rhetoric is assailed on various grounds: first, as desiring to persuade, without a
knowledge of the truth; and secondly, as ignoring the distinction between certain and
probable matter. The three speeches are then passed in review: the first of them has no
definition of the nature of love, and no order in the topics (being in these respects far
inferior to the second); while the third of them is found (though a fancy of the hour) to
be framed upon real dialectical principles. But dialectic is not rhetoric; nothing on that
subject is to be found in the endless treatises of rhetoric, however prolific in hard names.
When Plato has sufficiently put them to the test of ridicule he touches, as with the point
of a needle, the real error, which is the confusion of preliminary knowledge with creative
power. No attainments will provide the speaker with genius; and the sort of attainments
which can alone be of any value are the higher philosophy and the power of
psychological analysis, which is given by dialectic, but not by the rules of the
rhetoricians.
In this latter portion of the Dialogue there are many texts which may help us to speak
and to think. The names dialectic and rhetoric are passing out of use; we hardly examine
seriously into their nature and limits, and probably the arts both of speaking and of
conversation have been unduly neglected by us. But the mind of Socrates pierces
through the differences of times and countries into the essential nature of man; and his
words apply equally to the modern world and to the Athenians of old. Would he not
have asked of us, or rather is he not asking of us, Whether we have ceased to prefer
appearances to reality? Let us take a survey of the professions to which he refers and try
them by his standard. Is not all literature passing into criticism, just as Athenian
literature in the age of Plato was degenerating into sophistry and rhetoric? We can
discourse and write about poems and paintings, but we seem to have lost the gift of
creating them. Can we wonder that few of them ‘come sweetly from nature,’ while ten
thousand reviewers (mala murioi) are engaged in dissecting them? Young men, like
Phaedrus, are enamoured of their own literary clique and have but a feeble sympathy
with the master-minds of former ages. They recognize ‘a POETICAL necessity in the
writings of their favourite author, even when he boldly wrote off just what came in his
head.’ They are beginning to think that Art is enough, just at the time when Art is about
to disappear from the world. And would not a great painter, such as Michael Angelo, or
a great poet, such as Shakespeare, returning to earth, ‘courteously rebuke’ us—would he
not say that we are putting ‘in the place of Art the preliminaries of Art,’ confusing Art
the expression of mind and truth with Art the composition of colours and forms; and
perhaps he might more severely chastise some of us for trying to invent ‘a new shudder’
instead of bringing to the birth living and healthy creations? These he would regard as
the signs of an age wanting in original power.
Turning from literature and the arts to law and politics, again we fall under the lash of
Socrates. For do we not often make ‘the worse appear the better cause;’ and do not
‘both parties sometimes agree to tell lies’? Is not pleading ‘an art of speaking
unconnected with the truth’? There is another text of Socrates which must not be
forgotten in relation to this subject. In the endless maze of English law is there any
‘dividing the whole into parts or reuniting the parts into a whole’—any semblance of an
organized being ‘having hands and feet and other members’? Instead of a system there
is the Chaos of Anaxagoras (omou panta chremata) and no Mind or Order. Then again
in the noble art of politics, who thinks of first principles and of true ideas? We avowedly
follow not the truth but the will of the many (compare Republic). Is not legislation too a
sort of literary effort, and might not statesmanship be described as the ‘art of
enchanting’ the house? While there are some politicians who have no knowledge of the
truth, but only of what is likely to be approved by ‘the many who sit in judgment,’ there
are others who can give no form to their ideal, neither having learned ‘the art of
persuasion,’ nor having any insight into the ‘characters of men.’ Once more, has not
medical science become a professional routine, which many ‘practise without being able
to say who were their instructors’—the application of a few drugs taken from a book
instead of a life-long study of the natures and constitutions of human beings? Do we
see as clearly as Hippocrates ‘that the nature of the body can only be understood as a
whole’? (Compare Charm.) And are not they held to be the wisest physicians who have
the greatest distrust of their art? What would Socrates think of our newspapers, of our
theology? Perhaps he would be afraid to speak of them;—the one vox populi, the other
vox Dei, he might hesitate to attack them; or he might trace a fanciful connexion
between them, and ask doubtfully, whether they are not equally inspired? He would
remark that we are always searching for a belief and deploring our unbelief, seeming to
prefer popular opinions unverified and contradictory to unpopular truths which are
assured to us by the most certain proofs: that our preachers are in the habit of praising
God ‘without regard to truth and falsehood, attributing to Him every species of
greatness and glory, saying that He is all this and the cause of all that, in order that we
may exhibit Him as the fairest and best of all’ (Symp.) without any consideration of His
real nature and character or of the laws by which He governs the world—seeking for a
‘private judgment’ and not for the truth or ‘God’s judgment.’ What would he say of the
Church, which we praise in like manner, ‘meaning ourselves,’ without regard to history
or experience? Might he not ask, whether we ‘care more for the truth of religion, or for
the speaker and the country from which the truth comes’? or, whether the ‘select wise’
are not ‘the many’ after all? (Symp.) So we may fill up the sketch of Socrates, lest, as
Phaedrus says, the argument should be too ‘abstract and barren of illustrations.’
(Compare Symp., Apol., Euthyphro.)
He next proceeds with enthusiasm to define the royal art of dialectic as the power of
dividing a whole into parts, and of uniting the parts in a whole, and which may also be
regarded (compare Soph.) as the process of the mind talking with herself. The latter
view has probably led Plato to the paradox that speech is superior to writing, in which
he may seem also to be doing an injustice to himself. For the two cannot be fairly
compared in the manner which Plato suggests. The contrast of the living and dead
word, and the example of Socrates, which he has represented in the form of the
Dialogue, seem to have misled him. For speech and writing have really different
functions; the one is more transitory, more diffuse, more elastic and capable of
adaptation to moods and times; the other is more permanent, more concentrated, and
is uttered not to this or that person or audience, but to all the world. In the Politicus the
paradox is carried further; the mind or will of the king is preferred to the written law; he
is supposed to be the Law personified, the ideal made Life.
Yet in both these statements there is also contained a truth; they may be compared with
one another, and also with the other famous paradox, that ‘knowledge cannot be
taught.’ Socrates means to say, that what is truly written is written in the soul, just as
what is truly taught grows up in the soul from within and is not forced upon it from
without. When planted in a congenial soil the little seed becomes a tree, and ‘the birds
of the air build their nests in the branches.’ There is an echo of this in the prayer at the
end of the Dialogue, ‘Give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the inward and
outward man be at one.’ We may further compare the words of St. Paul, ‘Written not on
tables of stone, but on fleshly tables of the heart;’ and again, ‘Ye are my epistles known
and read of all men.’ There may be a use in writing as a preservative against the
forgetfulness of old age, but to live is higher far, to be ourselves the book, or the epistle,
the truth embodied in a person, the Word made flesh. Something like this we may
believe to have passed before Plato’s mind when he affirmed that speech was superior
to writing. So in other ages, weary of literature and criticism, of making many books, of
writing articles in reviews, some have desired to live more closely in communion with
their fellow-men, to speak heart to heart, to speak and act only, and not to write,
following the example of Socrates and of Christ...
Some other touches of inimitable grace and art and of the deepest wisdom may be also
noted; such as the prayer or ‘collect’ which has just been cited, ‘Give me beauty,’ etc.; or
‘the great name which belongs to God alone;’ or ‘the saying of wiser men than ourselves
that a man of sense should try to please not his fellow-servants, but his good and noble
masters,’ like St. Paul again; or the description of the ‘heavenly originals’...
The chief criteria for determining the date of the Dialogue are (1) the ages of Lysias and
Isocrates; (2) the character of the work.
Lysias was born in the year 458; Isocrates in the year 436, about seven years before the
birth of Plato. The first of the two great rhetoricians is described as in the zenith of his
fame; the second is still young and full of promise. Now it is argued that this must have
been written in the youth of Isocrates, when the promise was not yet fulfilled. And thus
we should have to assign the Dialogue to a year not later than 406, when Isocrates was
thirty and Plato twenty-three years of age, and while Socrates himself was still alive.
Those who argue in this way seem not to reflect how easily Plato can ‘invent Egyptians
or anything else,’ and how careless he is of historical truth or probability. Who would
suspect that the wise Critias, the virtuous Charmides, had ended their lives among the
thirty tyrants? Who would imagine that Lysias, who is here assailed by Socrates, is the
son of his old friend Cephalus? Or that Isocrates himself is the enemy of Plato and his
school? No arguments can be drawn from the appropriateness or inappropriateness of
the characters of Plato. (Else, perhaps, it might be further argued that, judging from their
extant remains, insipid rhetoric is far more characteristic of Isocrates than of Lysias.) But
Plato makes use of names which have often hardly any connection with the historical
characters to whom they belong. In this instance the comparative favour shown to
Isocrates may possibly be accounted for by the circumstance of his belonging to the
aristocratical, as Lysias to the democratical party.
Few persons will be inclined to suppose, in the superficial manner of some ancient
critics, that a dialogue which treats of love must necessarily have been written in youth.
As little weight can be attached to the argument that Plato must have visited Egypt
before he wrote the story of Theuth and Thamus. For there is no real proof that he ever
went to Egypt; and even if he did, he might have known or invented Egyptian traditions
before he went there. The late date of the Phaedrus will have to be established by other
arguments than these: the maturity of the thought, the perfection of the style, the
insight, the relation to the other Platonic Dialogues, seem to contradict the notion that it
could have been the work of a youth of twenty or twenty-three years of age. The
cosmological notion of the mind as the primum mobile, and the admission of impulse
into the immortal nature, also afford grounds for assigning a later date. (Compare Tim.,
Soph., Laws.) Add to this that the picture of Socrates, though in some lesser
particulars,—e.g. his going without sandals, his habit of remaining within the walls, his
emphatic declaration that his study is human nature,—an exact resemblance, is in the
main the Platonic and not the real Socrates. Can we suppose ‘the young man to have
told such lies’ about his master while he was still alive? Moreover, when two Dialogues
are so closely connected as the Phaedrus and Symposium, there is great improbability in
supposing that one of them was written at least twenty years after the other. The
conclusion seems to be, that the Dialogue was written at some comparatively late but
unknown period of Plato’s life, after he had deserted the purely Socratic point of view,
but before he had entered on the more abstract speculations of the Sophist or the
Philebus. Taking into account the divisions of the soul, the doctrine of transmigration,
the contemplative nature of the philosophic life, and the character of the style, we shall
not be far wrong in placing the Phaedrus in the neighbourhood of the Republic;
remarking only that allowance must be made for the poetical element in the Phaedrus,
which, while falling short of the Republic in definite philosophic results, seems to have
glimpses of a truth beyond.
Two short passages, which are unconnected with the main subject of the Dialogue, may
seem to merit a more particular notice: (1) the locus classicus about mythology; (2) the
tale of the grasshoppers.
The first passage is remarkable as showing that Plato was entirely free from what may
be termed the Euhemerism of his age. For there were Euhemerists in Hellas long before
Euhemerus. Early philosophers, like Anaxagoras and Metrodorus, had found in Homer
and mythology hidden meanings. Plato, with a truer instinct, rejects these attractive
interpretations; he regards the inventor of them as ‘unfortunate;’ and they draw a man
off from the knowledge of himself. There is a latent criticism, and also a poetical sense in
Plato, which enable him to discard them, and yet in another way to make use of poetry
and mythology as a vehicle of thought and feeling. What would he have said of the
discovery of Christian doctrines in these old Greek legends? While acknowledging that
such interpretations are ‘very nice,’ would he not have remarked that they are found in
all sacred literatures? They cannot be tested by any criterion of truth, or used to
establish any truth; they add nothing to the sum of human knowledge; they are—what
we please, and if employed as ‘peacemakers’ between the new and old are liable to
serious misconstruction, as he elsewhere remarks (Republic). And therefore he would
have ‘bid Farewell to them; the study of them would take up too much of his time; and
he has not as yet learned the true nature of religion.’ The ‘sophistical’ interest of
Phaedrus, the little touch about the two versions of the story, the ironical manner in
which these explanations are set aside—‘the common opinion about them is enough for
me’—the allusion to the serpent Typho may be noted in passing; also the general
agreement between the tone of this speech and the remark of Socrates which follows
afterwards, ‘I am a diviner, but a poor one.’
The tale of the grasshoppers is naturally suggested by the surrounding scene. They are
also the representatives of the Athenians as children of the soil. Under the image of the
lively chirruping grasshoppers who inform the Muses in heaven about those who
honour them on earth, Plato intends to represent an Athenian audience (tettigessin
eoikotes). The story is introduced, apparently, to mark a change of subject, and also, like
several other allusions which occur in the course of the Dialogue, in order to preserve
the scene in the recollection of the reader.
...
No one can duly appreciate the dialogues of Plato, especially the Phaedrus, Symposium,
and portions of the Republic, who has not a sympathy with mysticism. To the
uninitiated, as he would himself have acknowledged, they will appear to be the dreams
of a poet who is disguised as a philosopher. There is a twofold difficulty in
apprehending this aspect of the Platonic writings. First, we do not immediately realize
that under the marble exterior of Greek literature was concealed a soul thrilling with
spiritual emotion. Secondly, the forms or figures which the Platonic philosophy assumes,
are not like the images of the prophet Isaiah, or of the Apocalypse, familiar to us in the
days of our youth. By mysticism we mean, not the extravagance of an erring fancy, but
the concentration of reason in feeling, the enthusiastic love of the good, the true, the
one, the sense of the infinity of knowledge and of the marvel of the human faculties.
When feeding upon such thoughts the ‘wing of the soul’ is renewed and gains strength;
she is raised above ‘the manikins of earth’ and their opinions, waiting in wonder to
know, and working with reverence to find out what God in this or in another life may
reveal to her.
ON THE DECLINE OF GREEK LITERATURE.
One of the main purposes of Plato in the Phaedrus is to satirize Rhetoric, or rather the
Professors of Rhetoric who swarmed at Athens in the fourth century before Christ. As in
the opening of the Dialogue he ridicules the interpreters of mythology; as in the
Protagoras he mocks at the Sophists; as in the Euthydemus he makes fun of the wordsplitting
Eristics; as in the Cratylus he ridicules the fancies of Etymologers; as in the
Meno and Gorgias and some other dialogues he makes reflections and casts sly
imputation upon the higher classes at Athens; so in the Phaedrus, chiefly in the latter
part, he aims his shafts at the rhetoricians. The profession of rhetoric was the greatest
and most popular in Athens, necessary ‘to a man’s salvation,’ or at any rate to his
attainment of wealth or power; but Plato finds nothing wholesome or genuine in the
purpose of it. It is a veritable ‘sham,’ having no relation to fact, or to truth of any kind. It
is antipathetic to him not only as a philosopher, but also as a great writer. He cannot
abide the tricks of the rhetoricians, or the pedantries and mannerisms which they
introduce into speech and writing. He sees clearly how far removed they are from the
ways of simplicity and truth, and how ignorant of the very elements of the art which
they are professing to teach. The thing which is most necessary of all, the knowledge of
human nature, is hardly if at all considered by them. The true rules of composition,
which are very few, are not to be found in their voluminous systems. Their
pretentiousness, their omniscience, their large fortunes, their impatience of argument,
their indifference to first principles, their stupidity, their progresses through Hellas
accompanied by a troop of their disciples—these things were very distasteful to Plato,
who esteemed genius far above art, and was quite sensible of the interval which
separated them (Phaedrus). It is the interval which separates Sophists and rhetoricians
from ancient famous men and women such as Homer and Hesiod, Anacreon and
Sappho, Aeschylus and Sophocles; and the Platonic Socrates is afraid that, if he
approves the former, he will be disowned by the latter. The spirit of rhetoric was soon to
overspread all Hellas; and Plato with prophetic insight may have seen, from afar, the
great literary waste or dead level, or interminable marsh, in which Greek literature was
soon to disappear. A similar vision of the decline of the Greek drama and of the contrast
of the old literature and the new was present to the mind of Aristophanes after the
death of the three great tragedians (Frogs). After about a hundred, or at most two
hundred years if we exclude Homer, the genius of Hellas had ceased to flower or
blossom. The dreary waste which follows, beginning with the Alexandrian writers and
even before them in the platitudes of Isocrates and his school, spreads over much more
than a thousand years. And from this decline the Greek language and literature, unlike
the Latin, which has come to life in new forms and been developed into the great
European languages, never recovered.
This monotony of literature, without merit, without genius and without character, is a
phenomenon which deserves more attention than it has hitherto received; it is a
phenomenon unique in the literary history of the world. How could there have been so
much cultivation, so much diligence in writing, and so little mind or real creative power?
Why did a thousand years invent nothing better than Sibylline books, Orphic poems,
Byzantine imitations of classical histories, Christian reproductions of Greek plays, novels
like the silly and obscene romances of Longus and Heliodorus, innumerable forged
epistles, a great many epigrams, biographies of the meanest and most meagre
description, a sham philosophy which was the bastard progeny of the union between
Hellas and the East? Only in Plutarch, in Lucian, in Longinus, in the Roman emperors
Marcus Aurelius and Julian, in some of the Christian fathers are there any traces of good
sense or originality, or any power of arousing the interest of later ages. And when new
books ceased to be written, why did hosts of grammarians and interpreters flock in, who
never attain to any sound notion either of grammar or interpretation? Why did the
physical sciences never arrive at any true knowledge or make any real progress? Why
did poetry droop and languish? Why did history degenerate into fable? Why did words
lose their power of expression? Why were ages of external greatness and magnificence
attended by all the signs of decay in the human mind which are possible?
To these questions many answers may be given, which if not the true causes, are at least
to be reckoned among the symptoms of the decline. There is the want of method in
physical science, the want of criticism in history, the want of simplicity or delicacy in
poetry, the want of political freedom, which is the true atmosphere of public speaking,
in oratory. The ways of life were luxurious and commonplace. Philosophy had become
extravagant, eclectic, abstract, devoid of any real content. At length it ceased to exist. It
had spread words like plaster over the whole field of knowledge. It had grown ascetic on
one side, mystical on the other. Neither of these tendencies was favourable to literature.
There was no sense of beauty either in language or in art. The Greek world became
vacant, barbaric, oriental. No one had anything new to say, or any conviction of truth.
The age had no remembrance of the past, no power of understanding what other ages
thought and felt. The Catholic faith had degenerated into dogma and controversy. For
more than a thousand years not a single writer of first-rate, or even of second-rate,
reputation has a place in the innumerable rolls of Greek literature.
If we seek to go deeper, we can still only describe the outward nature of the clouds or
darkness which were spread over the heavens during so many ages without relief or
light. We may say that this, like several other long periods in the history of the human
race, was destitute, or deprived of the moral qualities which are the root of literary
excellence. It had no life or aspiration, no national or political force, no desire for
consistency, no love of knowledge for its own sake. It did not attempt to pierce the
mists which surrounded it. It did not propose to itself to go forward and scale the
heights of knowledge, but to go backwards and seek at the beginning what can only be
found towards the end. It was lost in doubt and ignorance. It rested upon tradition and
authority. It had none of the higher play of fancy which creates poetry; and where there
is no true poetry, neither can there be any good prose. It had no great characters, and
therefore it had no great writers. It was incapable of distinguishing between words and
things. It was so hopelessly below the ancient standard of classical Greek art and
literature that it had no power of understanding or of valuing them. It is doubtful
whether any Greek author was justly appreciated in antiquity except by his own
contemporaries; and this neglect of the great authors of the past led to the
disappearance of the larger part of them, while the Greek fathers were mostly preserved.
There is no reason to suppose that, in the century before the taking of Constantinople,
much more was in existence than the scholars of the Renaissance carried away with
them to Italy.
The character of Greek literature sank lower as time went on. It consisted more and
more of compilations, of scholia, of extracts, of commentaries, forgeries, imitations. The
commentator or interpreter had no conception of his author as a whole, and very little
of the context of any passage which he was explaining. The least things were preferred
by him to the greatest. The question of a reading, or a grammatical form, or an accent,
or the uses of a word, took the place of the aim or subject of the book. He had no sense
of the beauties of an author, and very little light is thrown by him on real difficulties. He
interprets past ages by his own. The greatest classical writers are the least appreciated
by him. This seems to be the reason why so many of them have perished, why the lyric
poets have almost wholly disappeared; why, out of the eighty or ninety tragedies of
Aeschylus and Sophocles, only seven of each had been preserved.
Such an age of sciolism and scholasticism may possibly once more get the better of the
literary world. There are those who prophesy that the signs of such a day are again
appearing among us, and that at the end of the present century no writer of the first
class will be still alive. They think that the Muse of Literature may transfer herself to
other countries less dried up or worn out than our own. They seem to see the withering
effect of criticism on original genius. No one can doubt that such a decay or decline of
literature and of art seriously affects the manners and character of a nation. It takes
away half the joys and refinements of life; it increases its dulness and grossness. Hence it
becomes a matter of great interest to consider how, if at all, such a degeneracy may be
averted. Is there any elixir which can restore life and youth to the literature of a nation,
or at any rate which can prevent it becoming unmanned and enfeebled?
First there is the progress of education. It is possible, and even probable, that the
extension of the means of knowledge over a wider area and to persons living under new
conditions may lead to many new combinations of thought and language. But, as yet,
experience does not favour the realization of such a hope or promise. It may be truly
answered that at present the training of teachers and the methods of education are very
imperfect, and therefore that we cannot judge of the future by the present. When more
of our youth are trained in the best literatures, and in the best parts of them, their minds
may be expected to have a larger growth. They will have more interests, more thoughts,
more material for conversation; they will have a higher standard and begin to think for
themselves. The number of persons who will have the opportunity of receiving the
highest education through the cheap press, and by the help of high schools and
colleges, may increase tenfold. It is likely that in every thousand persons there is at least
one who is far above the average in natural capacity, but the seed which is in him dies
for want of cultivation. It has never had any stimulus to grow, or any field in which to
blossom and produce fruit. Here is a great reservoir or treasure-house of human
intelligence out of which new waters may flow and cover the earth. If at any time the
great men of the world should die out, and originality or genius appear to suffer a
partial eclipse, there is a boundless hope in the multitude of intelligences for future
generations. They may bring gifts to men such as the world has never received before.
They may begin at a higher point and yet take with them all the results of the past. The
co-operation of many may have effects not less striking, though different in character
from those which the creative genius of a single man, such as Bacon or Newton,
formerly produced. There is also great hope to be derived, not merely from the
extension of education over a wider area, but from the continuance of it during many
generations. Educated parents will have children fit to receive education; and these
again will grow up under circumstances far more favourable to the growth of
intelligence than any which have hitherto existed in our own or in former ages.
Even if we were to suppose no more men of genius to be produced, the great writers of
ancient or of modern times will remain to furnish abundant materials of education to
the coming generation. Now that every nation holds communication with every other,
we may truly say in a fuller sense than formerly that ‘the thoughts of men are widened
with the process of the suns.’ They will not be ‘cribbed, cabined, and confined’ within a
province or an island. The East will provide elements of culture to the West as well as the
West to the East. The religions and literatures of the world will be open books, which he
who wills may read. The human race may not be always ground down by bodily toil, but
may have greater leisure for the improvement of the mind. The increasing sense of the
greatness and infinity of nature will tend to awaken in men larger and more liberal
thoughts. The love of mankind may be the source of a greater development of literature
than nationality has ever been. There may be a greater freedom from prejudice and
party; we may better understand the whereabouts of truth, and therefore there may be
more success and fewer failures in the search for it. Lastly, in the coming ages we shall
carry with us the recollection of the past, in which are necessarily contained many seeds
of revival and renaissance in the future. So far is the world from becoming exhausted, so
groundless is the fear that literature will ever die out.
PHAEDRUS
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Phaedrus.
SCENE: Under a plane-tree, by the banks of the Ilissus.
SOCRATES: My dear Phaedrus, whence come you, and whither are you going?
PHAEDRUS: I come from Lysias the son of Cephalus, and I am going to take a walk
outside the wall, for I have been sitting with him the whole morning; and our common
friend Acumenus tells me that it is much more refreshing to walk in the open air than to
be shut up in a cloister.
SOCRATES: There he is right. Lysias then, I suppose, was in the town?
PHAEDRUS: Yes, he was staying with Epicrates, here at the house of Morychus; that
house which is near the temple of Olympian Zeus.
SOCRATES: And how did he entertain you? Can I be wrong in supposing that Lysias gave
you a feast of discourse?
PHAEDRUS: You shall hear, if you can spare time to accompany me.
SOCRATES: And should I not deem the conversation of you and Lysias ‘a thing of higher
import,’ as I may say in the words of Pindar, ‘than any business’?
PHAEDRUS: Will you go on?
SOCRATES: And will you go on with the narration?
PHAEDRUS: My tale, Socrates, is one of your sort, for love was the theme which
occupied us—love after a fashion: Lysias has been writing about a fair youth who was
being tempted, but not by a lover; and this was the point: he ingeniously proved that
the non-lover should be accepted rather than the lover.
SOCRATES: O that is noble of him! I wish that he would say the poor man rather than
the rich, and the old man rather than the young one;—then he would meet the case of
me and of many a man; his words would be quite refreshing, and he would be a public
benefactor. For my part, I do so long to hear his speech, that if you walk all the way to
Megara, and when you have reached the wall come back, as Herodicus recommends,
without going in, I will keep you company.
PHAEDRUS: What do you mean, my good Socrates? How can you imagine that my
unpractised memory can do justice to an elaborate work, which the greatest rhetorician
of the age spent a long time in composing. Indeed, I cannot; I would give a great deal if
I could.
SOCRATES: I believe that I know Phaedrus about as well as I know myself, and I am very
sure that the speech of Lysias was repeated to him, not once only, but again and
again;—he insisted on hearing it many times over and Lysias was very willing to gratify
him; at last, when nothing else would do, he got hold of the book, and looked at what
he most wanted to see,— this occupied him during the whole morning;—and then when
he was tired with sitting, he went out to take a walk, not until, by the dog, as I believe,
he had simply learned by heart the entire discourse, unless it was unusually long, and he
went to a place outside the wall that he might practise his lesson. There he saw a certain
lover of discourse who had a similar weakness;—he saw and rejoiced; now thought he, ‘I
shall have a partner in my revels.’ And he invited him to come and walk with him. But
when the lover of discourse begged that he would repeat the tale, he gave himself airs
and said, ‘No I cannot,’ as if he were indisposed; although, if the hearer had refused, he
would sooner or later have been compelled by him to listen whether he would or no.
Therefore, Phaedrus, bid him do at once what he will soon do whether bidden or not.
PHAEDRUS: I see that you will not let me off until I speak in some fashion or other; verily
therefore my best plan is to speak as I best can.
SOCRATES: A very true remark, that of yours.
PHAEDRUS: I will do as I say; but believe me, Socrates, I did not learn the very words—O
no; nevertheless I have a general notion of what he said, and will give you a summary of
the points in which the lover differed from the non-lover. Let me begin at the beginning.
SOCRATES: Yes, my sweet one; but you must first of all show what you have in your left
hand under your cloak, for that roll, as I suspect, is the actual discourse. Now, much as I
love you, I would not have you suppose that I am going to have your memory exercised
at my expense, if you have Lysias himself here.
PHAEDRUS: Enough; I see that I have no hope of practising my art upon you. But if I am
to read, where would you please to sit?
SOCRATES: Let us turn aside and go by the Ilissus; we will sit down at some quiet spot.
PHAEDRUS: I am fortunate in not having my sandals, and as you never have any, I think
that we may go along the brook and cool our feet in the water; this will be the easiest
way, and at midday and in the summer is far from being unpleasant.
SOCRATES: Lead on, and look out for a place in which we can sit down.
PHAEDRUS: Do you see the tallest plane-tree in the distance?
SOCRATES: Yes.
PHAEDRUS: There are shade and gentle breezes, and grass on which we may either sit
or lie down.
SOCRATES: Move forward.
PHAEDRUS: I should like to know, Socrates, whether the place is not somewhere here at
which Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia from the banks of the Ilissus?
SOCRATES: Such is the tradition.
PHAEDRUS: And is this the exact spot? The little stream is delightfully clear and bright; I
can fancy that there might be maidens playing near.
SOCRATES: I believe that the spot is not exactly here, but about a quarter of a mile lower
down, where you cross to the temple of Artemis, and there is, I think, some sort of an
altar of Boreas at the place.
PHAEDRUS: I have never noticed it; but I beseech you to tell me, Socrates, do you
believe this tale?
SOCRATES: The wise are doubtful, and I should not be singular if, like them, I too
doubted. I might have a rational explanation that Orithyia was playing with Pharmacia,
when a northern gust carried her over the neighbouring rocks; and this being the
manner of her death, she was said to have been carried away by Boreas. There is a
discrepancy, however, about the locality; according to another version of the story she
was taken from Areopagus, and not from this place. Now I quite acknowledge that these
allegories are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to invent them; much labour
and ingenuity will be required of him; and when he has once begun, he must go on and
rehabilitate Hippocentaurs and chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace,
and numberless other inconceivable and portentous natures. And if he is sceptical about
them, and would fain reduce them one after another to the rules of probability, this sort
of crude philosophy will take up a great deal of time. Now I have no leisure for such
enquiries; shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says;
to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my
own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common
opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about
myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent
Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner
and lowlier destiny? But let me ask you, friend: have we not reached the plane-tree to
which you were conducting us?
PHAEDRUS: Yes, this is the tree.
SOCRATES: By Here, a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents. Here is this
lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnus castus high and clustering, in the fullest
blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane-tree
is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a
spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is the breeze:—so very sweet;
and there is a sound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus
of the cicadae. But the greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to
the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide.
PHAEDRUS: What an incomprehensible being you are, Socrates: when you are in the
country, as you say, you really are like some stranger who is led about by a guide. Do
you ever cross the border? I rather think that you never venture even outside the gates.
SOCRATES: Very true, my good friend; and I hope that you will excuse me when you
hear the reason, which is, that I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the
city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country. Though I do indeed believe that
you have found a spell with which to draw me out of the city into the country, like a
hungry cow before whom a bough or a bunch of fruit is waved. For only hold up before
me in like manner a book, and you may lead me all round Attica, and over the wide
world. And now having arrived, I intend to lie down, and do you choose any posture in
which you can read best. Begin.
PHAEDRUS: Listen. You know how matters stand with me; and how, as I conceive, this
affair may be arranged for the advantage of both of us. And I maintain that I ought not
to fail in my suit, because I am not your lover: for lovers repent of the kindnesses which
they have shown when their passion ceases, but to the non-lovers who are free and not
under any compulsion, no time of repentance ever comes; for they confer their benefits
according to the measure of their ability, in the way which is most conducive to their
own interest. Then again, lovers consider how by reason of their love they have
neglected their own concerns and rendered service to others: and when to these
benefits conferred they add on the troubles which they have endured, they think that
they have long ago made to the beloved a very ample return. But the non-lover has no
such tormenting recollections; he has never neglected his affairs or quarrelled with his
relations; he has no troubles to add up or excuses to invent; and being well rid of all
these evils, why should he not freely do what will gratify the beloved? If you say that the
lover is more to be esteemed, because his love is thought to be greater; for he is willing
to say and do what is hateful to other men, in order to please his beloved;—that, if true,
is only a proof that he will prefer any future love to his present, and will injure his old
love at the pleasure of the new. And how, in a matter of such infinite importance, can a
man be right in trusting himself to one who is afflicted with a malady which no
experienced person would attempt to cure, for the patient himself admits that he is not
in his right mind, and acknowledges that he is wrong in his mind, but says that he is
unable to control himself? And if he came to his right mind, would he ever imagine that
the desires were good which he conceived when in his wrong mind? Once more, there
are many more non-lovers than lovers; and if you choose the best of the lovers, you will
not have many to choose from; but if from the non-lovers, the choice will be larger, and
you will be far more likely to find among them a person who is worthy of your
friendship. If public opinion be your dread, and you would avoid reproach, in all
probability the lover, who is always thinking that other men are as emulous of him as he
is of them, will boast to some one of his successes, and make a show of them openly in
the pride of his heart;—he wants others to know that his labour has not been lost; but
the non-lover is more his own master, and is desirous of solid good, and not of the
opinion of mankind. Again, the lover may be generally noted or seen following the
beloved (this is his regular occupation), and whenever they are observed to exchange
two words they are supposed to meet about some affair of love either past or in
contemplation; but when non-lovers meet, no one asks the reason why, because people
know that talking to another is natural, whether friendship or mere pleasure be the
motive. Once more, if you fear the fickleness of friendship, consider that in any other
case a quarrel might be a mutual calamity; but now, when you have given up what is
most precious to you, you will be the greater loser, and therefore, you will have more
reason in being afraid of the lover, for his vexations are many, and he is always fancying
that every one is leagued against him. Wherefore also he debars his beloved from
society; he will not have you intimate with the wealthy, lest they should exceed him in
wealth, or with men of education, lest they should be his superiors in understanding;
and he is equally afraid of anybody’s influence who has any other advantage over
himself. If he can persuade you to break with them, you are left without a friend in the
world; or if, out of a regard to your own interest, you have more sense than to comply
with his desire, you will have to quarrel with him. But those who are non-lovers, and
whose success in love is the reward of their merit, will not be jealous of the companions
of their beloved, and will rather hate those who refuse to be his associates, thinking that
their favourite is slighted by the latter and benefited by the former; for more love than
hatred may be expected to come to him out of his friendship with others. Many lovers
too have loved the person of a youth before they knew his character or his belongings;
so that when their passion has passed away, there is no knowing whether they will
continue to be his friends; whereas, in the case of non-lovers who were always friends,
the friendship is not lessened by the favours granted; but the recollection of these
remains with them, and is an earnest of good things to come.
Further, I say that you are likely to be improved by me, whereas the lover will spoil you.
For they praise your words and actions in a wrong way; partly, because they are afraid of
offending you, and also, their judgment is weakened by passion. Such are the feats
which love exhibits; he makes things painful to the disappointed which give no pain to
others; he compels the successful lover to praise what ought not to give him pleasure,
and therefore the beloved is to be pitied rather than envied. But if you listen to me, in
the first place, I, in my intercourse with you, shall not merely regard present enjoyment,
but also future advantage, being not mastered by love, but my own master; nor for
small causes taking violent dislikes, but even when the cause is great, slowly laying up
little wrath— unintentional offences I shall forgive, and intentional ones I shall try to
prevent; and these are the marks of a friendship which will last.
Do you think that a lover only can be a firm friend? reflect:—if this were true, we should
set small value on sons, or fathers, or mothers; nor should we ever have loyal friends, for
our love of them arises not from passion, but from other associations. Further, if we
ought to shower favours on those who are the most eager suitors,—on that principle,
we ought always to do good, not to the most virtuous, but to the most needy; for they
are the persons who will be most relieved, and will therefore be the most grateful; and
when you make a feast you should invite not your friend, but the beggar and the empty
soul; for they will love you, and attend you, and come about your doors, and will be the
best pleased, and the most grateful, and will invoke many a blessing on your head. Yet
surely you ought not to be granting favours to those who besiege you with prayer, but
to those who are best able to reward you; nor to the lover only, but to those who are
worthy of love; nor to those who will enjoy the bloom of your youth, but to those who
will share their possessions with you in age; nor to those who, having succeeded, will
glory in their success to others, but to those who will be modest and tell no tales; nor to
those who care about you for a moment only, but to those who will continue your
friends through life; nor to those who, when their passion is over, will pick a quarrel with
you, but rather to those who, when the charm of youth has left you, will show their own
virtue. Remember what I have said; and consider yet this further point: friends admonish
the lover under the idea that his way of life is bad, but no one of his kindred ever yet
censured the non-lover, or thought that he was ill-advised about his own interests.
‘Perhaps you will ask me whether I propose that you should indulge every non-lover. To
which I reply that not even the lover would advise you to indulge all lovers, for the
indiscriminate favour is less esteemed by the rational recipient, and less easily hidden by
him who would escape the censure of the world. Now love ought to be for the
advantage of both parties, and for the injury of neither.
‘I believe that I have said enough; but if there is anything more which you desire or
which in your opinion needs to be supplied, ask and I will answer.’
Now, Socrates, what do you think? Is not the discourse excellent, more especially in the
matter of the language?
SOCRATES: Yes, quite admirable; the effect on me was ravishing. And this I owe to you,
Phaedrus, for I observed you while reading to be in an ecstasy, and thinking that you are
more experienced in these matters than I am, I followed your example, and, like you, my
divine darling, I became inspired with a phrenzy.
PHAEDRUS: Indeed, you are pleased to be merry.
SOCRATES: Do you mean that I am not in earnest?
PHAEDRUS: Now don’t talk in that way, Socrates, but let me have your real opinion; I
adjure you, by Zeus, the god of friendship, to tell me whether you think that any Hellene
could have said more or spoken better on the same subject.
SOCRATES: Well, but are you and I expected to praise the sentiments of the author, or
only the clearness, and roundness, and finish, and tournure of the language? As to the
first I willingly submit to your better judgment, for I am not worthy to form an opinion,
having only attended to the rhetorical manner; and I was doubting whether this could
have been defended even by Lysias himself; I thought, though I speak under correction,
that he repeated himself two or three times, either from want of words or from want of
pains; and also, he appeared to me ostentatiously to exult in showing how well he could
say the same thing in two or three ways.
PHAEDRUS: Nonsense, Socrates; what you call repetition was the especial merit of the
speech; for he omitted no topic of which the subject rightly allowed, and I do not think
that any one could have spoken better or more exhaustively.
SOCRATES: There I cannot go along with you. Ancient sages, men and women, who have
spoken and written of these things, would rise up in judgment against me, if out of
complaisance I assented to you.
PHAEDRUS: Who are they, and where did you hear anything better than this?
SOCRATES: I am sure that I must have heard; but at this moment I do not remember
from whom; perhaps from Sappho the fair, or Anacreon the wise; or, possibly, from a
prose writer. Why do I say so? Why, because I perceive that my bosom is full, and that I
could make another speech as good as that of Lysias, and different. Now I am certain
that this is not an invention of my own, who am well aware that I know nothing, and
therefore I can only infer that I have been filled through the ears, like a pitcher, from the
waters of another, though I have actually forgotten in my stupidity who was my
informant.
PHAEDRUS: That is grand:—but never mind where you heard the discourse or from
whom; let that be a mystery not to be divulged even at my earnest desire. Only, as you
say, promise to make another and better oration, equal in length and entirely new, on
the same subject; and I, like the nine Archons, will promise to set up a golden image at
Delphi, not only of myself, but of you, and as large as life.
SOCRATES: You are a dear golden ass if you suppose me to mean that Lysias has
altogether missed the mark, and that I can make a speech from which all his arguments
are to be excluded. The worst of authors will say something which is to the point. Who,
for example, could speak on this thesis of yours without praising the discretion of the
non-lover and blaming the indiscretion of the lover? These are the commonplaces of the
subject which must come in (for what else is there to be said?) and must be allowed and
excused; the only merit is in the arrangement of them, for there can be none in the
invention; but when you leave the commonplaces, then there may be some originality.
PHAEDRUS: I admit that there is reason in what you say, and I too will be reasonable,
and will allow you to start with the premiss that the lover is more disordered in his wits
than the non-lover; if in what remains you make a longer and better speech than Lysias,
and use other arguments, then I say again, that a statue you shall have of beaten gold,
and take your place by the colossal offerings of the Cypselids at Olympia.
SOCRATES: How profoundly in earnest is the lover, because to tease him I lay a finger
upon his love! And so, Phaedrus, you really imagine that I am going to improve upon
the ingenuity of Lysias?
PHAEDRUS: There I have you as you had me, and you must just speak ‘as you best can.’
Do not let us exchange ‘tu quoque’ as in a farce, or compel me to say to you as you said
to me, ‘I know Socrates as well as I know myself, and he was wanting to speak, but he
gave himself airs.’ Rather I would have you consider that from this place we stir not until
you have unbosomed yourself of the speech; for here are we all alone, and I am
stronger, remember, and younger than you:—Wherefore perpend, and do not compel
me to use violence.
SOCRATES: But, my sweet Phaedrus, how ridiculous it would be of me to compete with
Lysias in an extempore speech! He is a master in his art and I am an untaught man.
PHAEDRUS: You see how matters stand; and therefore let there be no more pretences;
for, indeed, I know the word that is irresistible.
SOCRATES: Then don’t say it.
PHAEDRUS: Yes, but I will; and my word shall be an oath. ‘I say, or rather swear’—but
what god will be witness of my oath?—‘By this plane- tree I swear, that unless you
repeat the discourse here in the face of this very plane-tree, I will never tell you another;
never let you have word of another!’
SOCRATES: Villain! I am conquered; the poor lover of discourse has no more to say.
PHAEDRUS: Then why are you still at your tricks?
SOCRATES: I am not going to play tricks now that you have taken the oath, for I cannot
allow myself to be starved.
PHAEDRUS: Proceed.
SOCRATES: Shall I tell you what I will do?
PHAEDRUS: What?
SOCRATES: I will veil my face and gallop through the discourse as fast as I can, for if I
see you I shall feel ashamed and not know what to say.
PHAEDRUS: Only go on and you may do anything else which you please.
SOCRATES: Come, O ye Muses, melodious, as ye are called, whether you have received
this name from the character of your strains, or because the Melians are a musical race,
help, O help me in the tale which my good friend here desires me to rehearse, in order
that his friend whom he always deemed wise may seem to him to be wiser than ever.
Once upon a time there was a fair boy, or, more properly speaking, a youth; he was very
fair and had a great many lovers; and there was one special cunning one, who had
persuaded the youth that he did not love him, but he really loved him all the same; and
one day when he was paying his addresses to him, he used this very argument—that he
ought to accept the non-lover rather than the lover; his words were as follows:—
‘All good counsel begins in the same way; a man should know what he is advising
about, or his counsel will all come to nought. But people imagine that they know about
the nature of things, when they don’t know about them, and, not having come to an
understanding at first because they think that they know, they end, as might be
expected, in contradicting one another and themselves. Now you and I must not be
guilty of this fundamental error which we condemn in others; but as our question is
whether the lover or non-lover is to be preferred, let us first of all agree in defining the
nature and power of love, and then, keeping our eyes upon the definition and to this
appealing, let us further enquire whether love brings advantage or disadvantage.
‘Every one sees that love is a desire, and we know also that non-lovers desire the
beautiful and good. Now in what way is the lover to be distinguished from the nonlover?
Let us note that in every one of us there are two guiding and ruling principles
which lead us whither they will; one is the natural desire of pleasure, the other is an
acquired opinion which aspires after the best; and these two are sometimes in harmony
and then again at war, and sometimes the one, sometimes the other conquers. When
opinion by the help of reason leads us to the best, the conquering principle is called
temperance; but when desire, which is devoid of reason, rules in us and drags us to
pleasure, that power of misrule is called excess. Now excess has many names, and many
members, and many forms, and any of these forms when very marked gives a name,
neither honourable nor creditable, to the bearer of the name. The desire of eating, for
example, which gets the better of the higher reason and the other desires, is called
gluttony, and he who is possessed by it is called a glutton; the tyrannical desire of drink,
which inclines the possessor of the desire to drink, has a name which is only too
obvious, and there can be as little doubt by what name any other appetite of the same
family would be called;—it will be the name of that which happens to be dominant. And
now I think that you will perceive the drift of my discourse; but as every spoken word is
in a manner plainer than the unspoken, I had better say further that the irrational desire
which overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the
enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires which are her
own kindred—that supreme desire, I say, which by leading conquers and by the force of
passion is reinforced, from this very force, receiving a name, is called love (erromenos
eros).’
And now, dear Phaedrus, I shall pause for an instant to ask whether you do not think
me, as I appear to myself, inspired?
PHAEDRUS: Yes, Socrates, you seem to have a very unusual flow of words.
SOCRATES: Listen to me, then, in silence; for surely the place is holy; so that you must
not wonder, if, as I proceed, I appear to be in a divine fury, for already I am getting into
dithyrambics.
PHAEDRUS: Nothing can be truer.
SOCRATES: The responsibility rests with you. But hear what follows, and perhaps the fit
may be averted; all is in their hands above. I will go on talking to my youth. Listen:—
Thus, my friend, we have declared and defined the nature of the subject. Keeping the
definition in view, let us now enquire what advantage or disadvantage is likely to ensue
from the lover or the non-lover to him who accepts their advances.
He who is the victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure will of course desire to
make his beloved as agreeable to himself as possible. Now to him who has a mind
diseased anything is agreeable which is not opposed to him, but that which is equal or
superior is hateful to him, and therefore the lover will not brook any superiority or
equality on the part of his beloved; he is always employed in reducing him to inferiority.
And the ignorant is the inferior of the wise, the coward of the brave, the slow of speech
of the speaker, the dull of the clever. These, and not these only, are the mental defects
of the beloved;—defects which, when implanted by nature, are necessarily a delight to
the lover, and when not implanted, he must contrive to implant them in him, if he would
not be deprived of his fleeting joy. And therefore he cannot help being jealous, and will
debar his beloved from the advantages of society which would make a man of him, and
especially from that society which would have given him wisdom, and thereby he cannot
fail to do him great harm. That is to say, in his excessive fear lest he should come to be
despised in his eyes he will be compelled to banish from him divine philosophy; and
there is no greater injury which he can inflict upon him than this. He will contrive that his
beloved shall be wholly ignorant, and in everything shall look to him; he is to be the
delight of the lover’s heart, and a curse to himself. Verily, a lover is a profitable guardian
and associate for him in all that relates to his mind.
Let us next see how his master, whose law of life is pleasure and not good, will keep and
train the body of his servant. Will he not choose a beloved who is delicate rather than
sturdy and strong? One brought up in shady bowers and not in the bright sun, a
stranger to manly exercises and the sweat of toil, accustomed only to a soft and
luxurious diet, instead of the hues of health having the colours of paint and ornament,
and the rest of a piece?—such a life as any one can imagine and which I need not detail
at length. But I may sum up all that I have to say in a word, and pass on. Such a person
in war, or in any of the great crises of life, will be the anxiety of his friends and also of his
lover, and certainly not the terror of his enemies; which nobody can deny.
And now let us tell what advantage or disadvantage the beloved will receive from the
guardianship and society of his lover in the matter of his property; this is the next point
to be considered. The lover will be the first to see what, indeed, will be sufficiently
evident to all men, that he desires above all things to deprive his beloved of his dearest
and best and holiest possessions, father, mother, kindred, friends, of all whom he thinks
may be hinderers or reprovers of their most sweet converse; he will even cast a jealous
eye upon his gold and silver or other property, because these make him a less easy prey,
and when caught less manageable; hence he is of necessity displeased at his possession
of them and rejoices at their loss; and he would like him to be wifeless, childless,
homeless, as well; and the longer the better, for the longer he is all this, the longer he
will enjoy him.
There are some sort of animals, such as flatterers, who are dangerous and mischievous
enough, and yet nature has mingled a temporary pleasure and grace in their
composition. You may say that a courtesan is hurtful, and disapprove of such creatures
and their practices, and yet for the time they are very pleasant. But the lover is not only
hurtful to his love; he is also an extremely disagreeable companion. The old proverb says
that ‘birds of a feather flock together’; I suppose that equality of years inclines them to
the same pleasures, and similarity begets friendship; yet you may have more than
enough even of this; and verily constraint is always said to be grievous. Now the lover is
not only unlike his beloved, but he forces himself upon him. For he is old and his love is
young, and neither day nor night will he leave him if he can help; necessity and the sting
of desire drive him on, and allure him with the pleasure which he receives from seeing,
hearing, touching, perceiving him in every way. And therefore he is delighted to fasten
upon him and to minister to him. But what pleasure or consolation can the beloved be
receiving all this time? Must he not feel the extremity of disgust when he looks at an old
shrivelled face and the remainder to match, which even in a description is disagreeable,
and quite detestable when he is forced into daily contact with his lover; moreover he is
jealously watched and guarded against everything and everybody, and has to hear
misplaced and exaggerated praises of himself, and censures equally inappropriate,
which are intolerable when the man is sober, and, besides being intolerable, are
published all over the world in all their indelicacy and wearisomeness when he is drunk.
And not only while his love continues is he mischievous and unpleasant, but when his
love ceases he becomes a perfidious enemy of him on whom he showered his oaths and
prayers and promises, and yet could hardly prevail upon him to tolerate the tedium of
his company even from motives of interest. The hour of payment arrives, and now he is
the servant of another master; instead of love and infatuation, wisdom and temperance
are his bosom’s lords; but the beloved has not discovered the change which has taken
place in him, when he asks for a return and recalls to his recollection former sayings and
doings; he believes himself to be speaking to the same person, and the other, not
having the courage to confess the truth, and not knowing how to fulfil the oaths and
promises which he made when under the dominion of folly, and having now grown wise
and temperate, does not want to do as he did or to be as he was before. And so he runs
away and is constrained to be a defaulter; the oyster-shell (In allusion to a game in
which two parties fled or pursued according as an oyster-shell which was thrown into
the air fell with the dark or light side uppermost.) has fallen with the other side
uppermost—he changes pursuit into flight, while the other is compelled to follow him
with passion and imprecation, not knowing that he ought never from the first to have
accepted a demented lover instead of a sensible non-lover; and that in making such a
choice he was giving himself up to a faithless, morose, envious, disagreeable being,
hurtful to his estate, hurtful to his bodily health, and still more hurtful to the cultivation
of his mind, than which there neither is nor ever will be anything more honoured in the
eyes both of gods and men. Consider this, fair youth, and know that in the friendship of
the lover there is no real kindness; he has an appetite and wants to feed upon you:
‘As wolves love lambs so lovers love their loves.’
But I told you so, I am speaking in verse, and therefore I had better make an end;
enough.
PHAEDRUS: I thought that you were only half-way and were going to make a similar
speech about all the advantages of accepting the non-lover. Why do you not proceed?
SOCRATES: Does not your simplicity observe that I have got out of dithyrambics into
heroics, when only uttering a censure on the lover? And if I am to add the praises of the
non-lover what will become of me? Do you not perceive that I am already overtaken by
the Nymphs to whom you have mischievously exposed me? And therefore I will only
add that the non-lover has all the advantages in which the lover is accused of being
deficient. And now I will say no more; there has been enough of both of them. Leaving
the tale to its fate, I will cross the river and make the best of my way home, lest a worse
thing be inflicted upon me by you.
PHAEDRUS: Not yet, Socrates; not until the heat of the day has passed; do you not see
that the hour is almost noon? there is the midday sun standing still, as people say, in the
meridian. Let us rather stay and talk over what has been said, and then return in the
cool.
SOCRATES: Your love of discourse, Phaedrus, is superhuman, simply marvellous, and I
do not believe that there is any one of your contemporaries who has either made or in
one way or another has compelled others to make an equal number of speeches. I
would except Simmias the Theban, but all the rest are far behind you. And now I do
verily believe that you have been the cause of another.
PHAEDRUS: That is good news. But what do you mean?
SOCRATES: I mean to say that as I was about to cross the stream the usual sign was
given to me,—that sign which always forbids, but never bids, me to do anything which I
am going to do; and I thought that I heard a voice saying in my ear that I had been
guilty of impiety, and that I must not go away until I had made an atonement. Now I am
a diviner, though not a very good one, but I have enough religion for my own use, as
you might say of a bad writer—his writing is good enough for him; and I am beginning
to see that I was in error. O my friend, how prophetic is the human soul! At the time I
had a sort of misgiving, and, like Ibycus, ‘I was troubled; I feared that I might be buying
honour from men at the price of sinning against the gods.’ Now I recognize my error.
PHAEDRUS: What error?
SOCRATES: That was a dreadful speech which you brought with you, and you made me
utter one as bad.
PHAEDRUS: How so?
SOCRATES: It was foolish, I say,—to a certain extent, impious; can anything be more
dreadful?
PHAEDRUS: Nothing, if the speech was really such as you describe.
SOCRATES: Well, and is not Eros the son of Aphrodite, and a god?
PHAEDRUS: So men say.
SOCRATES: But that was not acknowledged by Lysias in his speech, nor by you in that
other speech which you by a charm drew from my lips. For if love be, as he surely is, a
divinity, he cannot be evil. Yet this was the error of both the speeches. There was also a
simplicity about them which was refreshing; having no truth or honesty in them,
nevertheless they pretended to be something, hoping to succeed in deceiving the
manikins of earth and gain celebrity among them. Wherefore I must have a purgation.
And I bethink me of an ancient purgation of mythological error which was devised, not
by Homer, for he never had the wit to discover why he was blind, but by Stesichorus,
who was a philosopher and knew the reason why; and therefore, when he lost his eyes,
for that was the penalty which was inflicted upon him for reviling the lovely Helen, he at
once purged himself. And the purgation was a recantation, which began thus,—
‘False is that word of mine—the truth is that thou didst not embark in ships, nor ever go
to the walls of Troy;’
and when he had completed his poem, which is called ‘the recantation,’ immediately his
sight returned to him. Now I will be wiser than either Stesichorus or Homer, in that I am
going to make my recantation for reviling love before I suffer; and this I will attempt, not
as before, veiled and ashamed, but with forehead bold and bare.
PHAEDRUS: Nothing could be more agreeable to me than to hear you say so.
SOCRATES: Only think, my good Phaedrus, what an utter want of delicacy was shown in
the two discourses; I mean, in my own and in that which you recited out of the book.
Would not any one who was himself of a noble and gentle nature, and who loved or
ever had loved a nature like his own, when we tell of the petty causes of lovers’
jealousies, and of their exceeding animosities, and of the injuries which they do to their
beloved, have imagined that our ideas of love were taken from some haunt of sailors to
which good manners were unknown—he would certainly never have admitted the
justice of our censure?
PHAEDRUS: I dare say not, Socrates.
SOCRATES: Therefore, because I blush at the thought of this person, and also because I
am afraid of Love himself, I desire to wash the brine out of my ears with water from the
spring; and I would counsel Lysias not to delay, but to write another discourse, which
shall prove that ‘ceteris paribus’ the lover ought to be accepted rather than the nonlover.

PHAEDRUS: Be assured that he shall. You shall speak the praises of the lover, and Lysias
shall be compelled by me to write another discourse on the same theme.
SOCRATES: You will be true to your nature in that, and therefore I believe you.
PHAEDRUS: Speak, and fear not.
SOCRATES: But where is the fair youth whom I was addressing before, and who ought to
listen now; lest, if he hear me not, he should accept a non- lover before he knows what
he is doing?
PHAEDRUS: He is close at hand, and always at your service.
SOCRATES: Know then, fair youth, that the former discourse was the word of Phaedrus,
the son of Vain Man, who dwells in the city of Myrrhina (Myrrhinusius). And this which I
am about to utter is the recantation of Stesichorus the son of Godly Man (Euphemus),
who comes from the town of Desire (Himera), and is to the following effect: ‘I told a lie
when I said’ that the beloved ought to accept the non-lover when he might have the
lover, because the one is sane, and the other mad. It might be so if madness were
simply an evil; but there is also a madness which is a divine gift, and the source of the
chiefest blessings granted to men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at
Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great
benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but when in their senses few or none.
And I might also tell you how the Sibyl and other inspired persons have given to many
an one many an intimation of the future which has saved them from falling. But it would
be tedious to speak of what every one knows.
There will be more reason in appealing to the ancient inventors of names (compare
Cratylus), who would never have connected prophecy (mantike) which foretells the
future and is the noblest of arts, with madness (manike), or called them both by the
same name, if they had deemed madness to be a disgrace or dishonour;—they must
have thought that there was an inspired madness which was a noble thing; for the two
words, mantike and manike, are really the same, and the letter tau is only a modern and
tasteless insertion. And this is confirmed by the name which was given by them to the
rational investigation of futurity, whether made by the help of birds or of other signs—
this, for as much as it is an art which supplies from the reasoning faculty mind (nous)
and information (istoria) to human thought (oiesis) they originally termed oionoistike,
but the word has been lately altered and made sonorous by the modern introduction of
the letter Omega (oionoistike and oionistike), and in proportion as prophecy (mantike) is
more perfect and august than augury, both in name and fact, in the same proportion, as
the ancients testify, is madness superior to a sane mind (sophrosune) for the one is only
of human, but the other of divine origin. Again, where plagues and mightiest woes have
bred in certain families, owing to some ancient blood-guiltiness, there madness has
entered with holy prayers and rites, and by inspired utterances found a way of
deliverance for those who are in need; and he who has part in this gift, and is truly
possessed and duly out of his mind, is by the use of purifications and mysteries made
whole and exempt from evil, future as well as present, and has a release from the
calamity which was afflicting him. The third kind is the madness of those who are
possessed by the Muses; which taking hold of a delicate and virgin soul, and there
inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad
actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. But he who, having no touch of
the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the
temple by the help of art—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man
disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.
I might tell of many other noble deeds which have sprung from inspired madness. And
therefore, let no one frighten or flutter us by saying that the temperate friend is to be
chosen rather than the inspired, but let him further show that love is not sent by the
gods for any good to lover or beloved; if he can do so we will allow him to carry off the
palm. And we, on our part, will prove in answer to him that the madness of love is the
greatest of heaven’s blessings, and the proof shall be one which the wise will receive,
and the witling disbelieve. But first of all, let us view the affections and actions of the
soul divine and human, and try to ascertain the truth about them. The beginning of our
proof is as follows:-
(Translated by Cic. Tus. Quaest.) The soul through all her being is immortal, for that
which is ever in motion is immortal; but that which moves another and is moved by
another, in ceasing to move ceases also to live. Only the self-moving, never leaving self,
never ceases to move, and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves
besides. Now, the beginning is unbegotten, for that which is begotten has a beginning;
but the beginning is begotten of nothing, for if it were begotten of something, then the
begotten would not come from a beginning. But if unbegotten, it must also be
indestructible; for if beginning were destroyed, there could be no beginning out of
anything, nor anything out of a beginning; and all things must have a beginning. And
therefore the self- moving is the beginning of motion; and this can neither be destroyed
nor begotten, else the whole heavens and all creation would collapse and stand still, and
never again have motion or birth. But if the self-moving is proved to be immortal, he
who affirms that self-motion is the very idea and essence of the soul will not be put to
confusion. For the body which is moved from without is soulless; but that which is
moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature of the soul. But if this be true, must
not the soul be the self-moving, and therefore of necessity unbegotten and immortal?
Enough of the soul’s immortality.
Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than
mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite—
a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of
the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed;
the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed,
and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity
gives a great deal of trouble to him. I will endeavour to explain to you in what way the
mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of
inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms
appearing—when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole
world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last
settles on the solid ground—there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which
appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of
soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. For immortal no such union can be
reasonably believed to be; although fancy, not having seen nor surely known the nature
of God, may imagine an immortal creature having both a body and also a soul which are
united throughout all time. Let that, however, be as God wills, and be spoken of
acceptably to him. And now let us ask the reason why the soul loses her wings!
The wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature
tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region,
which is the habitation of the gods. The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the
like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace; but when fed
upon evil and foulness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away. Zeus, the
mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all
and taking care of all; and there follows him the array of gods and demi-gods,
marshalled in eleven bands; Hestia alone abides at home in the house of heaven; of the
rest they who are reckoned among the princely twelve march in their appointed order.
They see many blessed sights in the inner heaven, and there are many ways to and fro,
along which the blessed gods are passing, every one doing his own work; he may follow
who will and can, for jealousy has no place in the celestial choir. But when they go to
banquet and festival, then they move up the steep to the top of the vault of heaven. The
chariots of the gods in even poise, obeying the rein, glide rapidly; but the others labour,
for the vicious steed goes heavily, weighing down the charioteer to the earth when his
steed has not been thoroughly trained:—and this is the hour of agony and extremest
conflict for the soul. For the immortals, when they are at the end of their course, go
forth and stand upon the outside of heaven, and the revolution of the spheres carries
them round, and they behold the things beyond. But of the heaven which is above the
heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? It is such as I will describe;
for I must dare to speak the truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being
with which true knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless, intangible essence,
visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul. The divine intelligence, being nurtured upon
mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of
receiving the food proper to it, rejoices at beholding reality, and once more gazing upon
truth, is replenished and made glad, until the revolution of the worlds brings her round
again to the same place. In the revolution she beholds justice, and temperance, and
knowledge absolute, not in the form of generation or of relation, which men call
existence, but knowledge absolute in existence absolute; and beholding the other true
existences in like manner, and feasting upon them, she passes down into the interior of
the heavens and returns home; and there the charioteer putting up his horses at the
stall, gives them ambrosia to eat and nectar to drink.
Such is the life of the gods; but of other souls, that which follows God best and is likest
to him lifts the head of the charioteer into the outer world, and is carried round in the
revolution, troubled indeed by the steeds, and with difficulty beholding true being; while
another only rises and falls, and sees, and again fails to see by reason of the unruliness
of the steeds. The rest of the souls are also longing after the upper world and they all
follow, but not being strong enough they are carried round below the surface, plunging,
treading on one another, each striving to be first; and there is confusion and
perspiration and the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed or have their
wings broken through the ill- driving of the charioteers; and all of them after a fruitless
toil, not having attained to the mysteries of true being, go away, and feed upon opinion.
The reason why the souls exhibit this exceeding eagerness to behold the plain of truth is
that pasturage is found there, which is suited to the highest part of the soul; and the
wing on which the soul soars is nourished with this. And there is a law of Destiny, that
the soul which attains any vision of truth in company with a god is preserved from harm
until the next period, and if attaining always is always unharmed. But when she is unable
to follow, and fails to behold the truth, and through some ill-hap sinks beneath the
double load of forgetfulness and vice, and her wings fall from her and she drops to the
ground, then the law ordains that this soul shall at her first birth pass, not into any other
animal, but only into man; and the soul which has seen most of truth shall come to the
birth as a philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature; that which has seen
truth in the second degree shall be some righteous king or warrior chief; the soul which
is of the third class shall be a politician, or economist, or trader; the fourth shall be a
lover of gymnastic toils, or a physician; the fifth shall lead the life of a prophet or
hierophant; to the sixth the character of poet or some other imitative artist will be
assigned; to the seventh the life of an artisan or husbandman; to the eighth that of a
sophist or demagogue; to the ninth that of a tyrant—all these are states of probation, in
which he who does righteously improves, and he who does unrighteously, deteriorates
his lot.
Ten thousand years must elapse before the soul of each one can return to the place
from whence she came, for she cannot grow her wings in less; only the soul of a
philosopher, guileless and true, or the soul of a lover, who is not devoid of philosophy,
may acquire wings in the third of the recurring periods of a thousand years; he is
distinguished from the ordinary good man who gains wings in three thousand years:—
and they who choose this life three times in succession have wings given them, and go
away at the end of three thousand years. But the others (The philosopher alone is not
subject to judgment (krisis), for he has never lost the vision of truth.) receive judgment
when they have completed their first life, and after the judgment they go, some of them
to the houses of correction which are under the earth, and are punished; others to some
place in heaven whither they are lightly borne by justice, and there they live in a manner
worthy of the life which they led here when in the form of men. And at the end of the
first thousand years the good souls and also the evil souls both come to draw lots and
choose their second life, and they may take any which they please. The soul of a man
may pass into the life of a beast, or from the beast return again into the man. But the
soul which has never seen the truth will not pass into the human form. For a man must
have intelligence of universals, and be able to proceed from the many particulars of
sense to one conception of reason;—this is the recollection of those things which our
soul once saw while following God—when regardless of that which we now call being
she raised her head up towards the true being. And therefore the mind of the
philosopher alone has wings; and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure
of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in
beholding which He is what He is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever
being initiated into perfect mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect. But, as he forgets
earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him;
they do not see that he is inspired.
Thus far I have been speaking of the fourth and last kind of madness, which is imputed
to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is transported with the recollection of the
true beauty; he would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and
looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.
And I have shown this of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest and the offspring
of the highest to him who has or shares in it, and that he who loves the beautiful is
called a lover because he partakes of it. For, as has been already said, every soul of man
has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into
the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may
have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly
lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting
influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few
only retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold here any
image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this
rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive. For there is no light of justice or
temperance or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies
of them: they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are few who, going to the
images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty. There was a time
when with the rest of the happy band they saw beauty shining in brightness,—we
philosophers following in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and then
we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called
most blessed, celebrated by us in our state of innocence, before we had any experience
of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple
and calm and happy, which we beheld shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet
enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the
body, like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger over the memory of scenes which have
passed away.
But of beauty, I repeat again that we saw her there shining in company with the celestial
forms; and coming to earth we find her here too, shining in clearness through the
clearest aperture of sense. For sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses; though
not by that is wisdom seen; her loveliness would have been transporting if there had
been a visible image of her, and the other ideas, if they had visible counterparts, would
be equally lovely. But this is the privilege of beauty, that being the loveliest she is also
the most palpable to sight. Now he who is not newly initiated or who has become
corrupted, does not easily rise out of this world to the sight of true beauty in the other;
he looks only at her earthly namesake, and instead of being awed at the sight of her, he
is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and beget; he
consorts with wantonness, and is not afraid or ashamed of pursuing pleasure in violation
of nature. But he whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator of many
glories in the other world, is amazed when he sees any one having a godlike face or
form, which is the expression of divine beauty; and at first a shudder runs through him,
and again the old awe steals over him; then looking upon the face of his beloved as of a
god he reverences him, and if he were not afraid of being thought a downright
madman, he would sacrifice to his beloved as to the image of a god; then while he
gazes on him there is a sort of reaction, and the shudder passes into an unusual heat
and perspiration; for, as he receives the effluence of beauty through the eyes, the wing
moistens and he warms. And as he warms, the parts out of which the wing grew, and
which had been hitherto closed and rigid, and had prevented the wing from shooting
forth, are melted, and as nourishment streams upon him, the lower end of the wing
begins to swell and grow from the root upwards; and the growth extends under the
whole soul—for once the whole was winged. During this process the whole soul is all in
a state of ebullition and effervescence,—which may be compared to the irritation and
uneasiness in the gums at the time of cutting teeth,—bubbles up, and has a feeling of
uneasiness and tickling; but when in like manner the soul is beginning to grow wings,
the beauty of the beloved meets her eye and she receives the sensible warm motion of
particles which flow towards her, therefore called emotion (imeros), and is refreshed and
warmed by them, and then she ceases from her pain with joy. But when she is parted
from her beloved and her moisture fails, then the orifices of the passage out of which
the wing shoots dry up and close, and intercept the germ of the wing; which, being shut
up with the emotion, throbbing as with the pulsations of an artery, pricks the aperture
which is nearest, until at length the entire soul is pierced and maddened and pained,
and at the recollection of beauty is again delighted. And from both of them together the
soul is oppressed at the strangeness of her condition, and is in a great strait and
excitement, and in her madness can neither sleep by night nor abide in her place by day.
And wherever she thinks that she will behold the beautiful one, thither in her desire she
runs. And when she has seen him, and bathed herself in the waters of beauty, her
constraint is loosened, and she is refreshed, and has no more pangs and pains; and this
is the sweetest of all pleasures at the time, and is the reason why the soul of the lover
will never forsake his beautiful one, whom he esteems above all; he has forgotten
mother and brethren and companions, and he thinks nothing of the neglect and loss of
his property; the rules and proprieties of life, on which he formerly prided himself, he
now despises, and is ready to sleep like a servant, wherever he is allowed, as near as he
can to his desired one, who is the object of his worship, and the physician who can
alone assuage the greatness of his pain. And this state, my dear imaginary youth to
whom I am talking, is by men called love, and among the gods has a name at which you,
in your simplicity, may be inclined to mock; there are two lines in the apocryphal
writings of Homer in which the name occurs. One of them is rather outrageous, and not
altogether metrical. They are as follows:
‘Mortals call him fluttering love, But the immortals call him winged one, Because the
growing of wings (Or, reading pterothoiton, ‘the movement of wings.’) is a necessity to
him.’
You may believe this, but not unless you like. At any rate the loves of lovers and their
causes are such as I have described.
Now the lover who is taken to be the attendant of Zeus is better able to bear the
winged god, and can endure a heavier burden; but the attendants and companions of
Ares, when under the influence of love, if they fancy that they have been at all wronged,
are ready to kill and put an end to themselves and their beloved. And he who follows in
the train of any other god, while he is unspoiled and the impression lasts, honours and
imitates him, as far as he is able; and after the manner of his God he behaves in his
intercourse with his beloved and with the rest of the world during the first period of his
earthly existence. Every one chooses his love from the ranks of beauty according to his
character, and this he makes his god, and fashions and adorns as a sort of image which
he is to fall down and worship. The followers of Zeus desire that their beloved should
have a soul like him; and therefore they seek out some one of a philosophical and
imperial nature, and when they have found him and loved him, they do all they can to
confirm such a nature in him, and if they have no experience of such a disposition
hitherto, they learn of any one who can teach them, and themselves follow in the same
way. And they have the less difficulty in finding the nature of their own god in
themselves, because they have been compelled to gaze intensely on him; their
recollection clings to him, and they become possessed of him, and receive from him
their character and disposition, so far as man can participate in God. The qualities of
their god they attribute to the beloved, wherefore they love him all the more, and if, like
the Bacchic Nymphs, they draw inspiration from Zeus, they pour out their own fountain
upon him, wanting to make him as like as possible to their own god. But those who are
the followers of Here seek a royal love, and when they have found him they do just the
same with him; and in like manner the followers of Apollo, and of every other god
walking in the ways of their god, seek a love who is to be made like him whom they
serve, and when they have found him, they themselves imitate their god, and persuade
their love to do the same, and educate him into the manner and nature of the god as far
as they each can; for no feelings of envy or jealousy are entertained by them towards
their beloved, but they do their utmost to create in him the greatest likeness of
themselves and of the god whom they honour. Thus fair and blissful to the beloved is
the desire of the inspired lover, and the initiation of which I speak into the mysteries of
true love, if he be captured by the lover and their purpose is effected. Now the beloved
is taken captive in the following manner:—
As I said at the beginning of this tale, I divided each soul into three— two horses and a
charioteer; and one of the horses was good and the other bad: the division may remain,
but I have not yet explained in what the goodness or badness of either consists, and to
that I will now proceed. The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty
neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour
and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the
whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering
animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark
colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion (Or with grey and blood-shot eyes.);
the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.
Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed
through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed,
then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved;
but the other, heedless of the pricks and of the blows of the whip, plunges and runs
away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces
to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of love. They at first indignantly
oppose him and will not be urged on to do terrible and unlawful deeds; but at last,
when he persists in plaguing them, they yield and agree to do as he bids them. And now
they are at the spot and behold the flashing beauty of the beloved; which when the
charioteer sees, his memory is carried to the true beauty, whom he beholds in company
with Modesty like an image placed upon a holy pedestal. He sees her, but he is afraid
and falls backwards in adoration, and by his fall is compelled to pull back the reins with
such violence as to bring both the steeds on their haunches, the one willing and
unresisting, the unruly one very unwilling; and when they have gone back a little, the
one is overcome with shame and wonder, and his whole soul is bathed in perspiration;
the other, when the pain is over which the bridle and the fall had given him, having with
difficulty taken breath, is full of wrath and reproaches, which he heaps upon the
charioteer and his fellow- steed, for want of courage and manhood, declaring that they
have been false to their agreement and guilty of desertion. Again they refuse, and again
he urges them on, and will scarce yield to their prayer that he would wait until another
time. When the appointed hour comes, they make as if they had forgotten, and he
reminds them, fighting and neighing and dragging them on, until at length he on the
same thoughts intent, forces them to draw near again. And when they are near he
stoops his head and puts up his tail, and takes the bit in his teeth and pulls shamelessly.
Then the charioteer is worse off than ever; he falls back like a racer at the barrier, and
with a still more violent wrench drags the bit out of the teeth of the wild steed and
covers his abusive tongue and jaws with blood, and forces his legs and haunches to the
ground and punishes him sorely. And when this has happened several times and the
villain has ceased from his wanton way, he is tamed and humbled, and follows the will of
the charioteer, and when he sees the beautiful one he is ready to die of fear. And from
that time forward the soul of the lover follows the beloved in modesty and holy fear.
And so the beloved who, like a god, has received every true and loyal service from his
lover, not in pretence but in reality, being also himself of a nature friendly to his admirer,
if in former days he has blushed to own his passion and turned away his lover, because
his youthful companions or others slanderously told him that he would be disgraced,
now as years advance, at the appointed age and time, is led to receive him into
communion. For fate which has ordained that there shall be no friendship among the
evil has also ordained that there shall ever be friendship among the good. And the
beloved when he has received him into communion and intimacy, is quite amazed at the
good-will of the lover; he recognises that the inspired friend is worth all other friends or
kinsmen; they have nothing of friendship in them worthy to be compared with his. And
when this feeling continues and he is nearer to him and embraces him, in gymnastic
exercises and at other times of meeting, then the fountain of that stream, which Zeus
when he was in love with Ganymede named Desire, overflows upon the lover, and some
enters into his soul, and some when he is filled flows out again; and as a breeze or an
echo rebounds from the smooth rocks and returns whence it came, so does the stream
of beauty, passing through the eyes which are the windows of the soul, come back to
the beautiful one; there arriving and quickening the passages of the wings, watering
them and inclining them to grow, and filling the soul of the beloved also with love. And
thus he loves, but he knows not what; he does not understand and cannot explain his
own state; he appears to have caught the infection of blindness from another; the lover
is his mirror in whom he is beholding himself, but he is not aware of this. When he is
with the lover, both cease from their pain, but when he is away then he longs as he is
longed for, and has love’s image, love for love (Anteros) lodging in his breast, which he
calls and believes to be not love but friendship only, and his desire is as the desire of the
other, but weaker; he wants to see him, touch him, kiss him, embrace him, and probably
not long afterwards his desire is accomplished. When they meet, the wanton steed of
the lover has a word to say to the charioteer; he would like to have a little pleasure in
return for many pains, but the wanton steed of the beloved says not a word, for he is
bursting with passion which he understands not;—he throws his arms round the lover
and embraces him as his dearest friend; and, when they are side by side, he is not in a
state in which he can refuse the lover anything, if he ask him; although his fellow-steed
and the charioteer oppose him with the arguments of shame and reason. After this their
happiness depends upon their self-control; if the better elements of the mind which
lead to order and philosophy prevail, then they pass their life here in happiness and
harmony—masters of themselves and orderly—enslaving the vicious and emancipating
the virtuous elements of the soul; and when the end comes, they are light and winged
for flight, having conquered in one of the three heavenly or truly Olympian victories; nor
can human discipline or divine inspiration confer any greater blessing on man than this.
If, on the other hand, they leave philosophy and lead the lower life of ambition, then
probably, after wine or in some other careless hour, the two wanton animals take the
two souls when off their guard and bring them together, and they accomplish that
desire of their hearts which to the many is bliss; and this having once enjoyed they
continue to enjoy, yet rarely because they have not the approval of the whole soul. They
too are dear, but not so dear to one another as the others, either at the time of their
love or afterwards. They consider that they have given and taken from each other the
most sacred pledges, and they may not break them and fall into enmity. At last they
pass out of the body, unwinged, but eager to soar, and thus obtain no mean reward of
love and madness. For those who have once begun the heavenward pilgrimage may not
go down again to darkness and the journey beneath the earth, but they live in light
always; happy companions in their pilgrimage, and when the time comes at which they
receive their wings they have the same plumage because of their love.
Thus great are the heavenly blessings which the friendship of a lover will confer upon
you, my youth. Whereas the attachment of the non-lover, which is alloyed with a worldly
prudence and has worldly and niggardly ways of doling out benefits, will breed in your
soul those vulgar qualities which the populace applaud, will send you bowling round the
earth during a period of nine thousand years, and leave you a fool in the world below.
And thus, dear Eros, I have made and paid my recantation, as well and as fairly as I
could; more especially in the matter of the poetical figures which I was compelled to
use, because Phaedrus would have them. And now forgive the past and accept the
present, and be gracious and merciful to me, and do not in thine anger deprive me of
sight, or take from me the art of love which thou hast given me, but grant that I may be
yet more esteemed in the eyes of the fair. And if Phaedrus or I myself said anything rude
in our first speeches, blame Lysias, who is the father of the brat, and let us have no more
of his progeny; bid him study philosophy, like his brother Polemarchus; and then his
lover Phaedrus will no longer halt between two opinions, but will dedicate himself
wholly to love and to philosophical discourses.
PHAEDRUS: I join in the prayer, Socrates, and say with you, if this be for my good, may
your words come to pass. But why did you make your second oration so much finer than
the first? I wonder why. And I begin to be afraid that I shall lose conceit of Lysias, and
that he will appear tame in comparison, even if he be willing to put another as fine and
as long as yours into the field, which I doubt. For quite lately one of your politicians was
abusing him on this very account; and called him a ‘speech writer’ again and again. So
that a feeling of pride may probably induce him to give up writing speeches.
SOCRATES: What a very amusing notion! But I think, my young man, that you are much
mistaken in your friend if you imagine that he is frightened at a little noise; and,
possibly, you think that his assailant was in earnest?
PHAEDRUS: I thought, Socrates, that he was. And you are aware that the greatest and
most influential statesmen are ashamed of writing speeches and leaving them in a
written form, lest they should be called Sophists by posterity.
SOCRATES: You seem to be unconscious, Phaedrus, that the ‘sweet elbow’ (A proverb,
like ‘the grapes are sour,’ applied to pleasures which cannot be had, meaning sweet
things which, like the elbow, are out of the reach of the mouth. The promised pleasure
turns out to be a long and tedious affair.) of the proverb is really the long arm of the
Nile. And you appear to be equally unaware of the fact that this sweet elbow of theirs is
also a long arm. For there is nothing of which our great politicians are so fond as of
writing speeches and bequeathing them to posterity. And they add their admirers’
names at the top of the writing, out of gratitude to them.
PHAEDRUS: What do you mean? I do not understand.
SOCRATES: Why, do you not know that when a politician writes, he begins with the
names of his approvers?
PHAEDRUS: How so?
SOCRATES: Why, he begins in this manner: ‘Be it enacted by the senate, the people, or
both, on the motion of a certain person,’ who is our author; and so putting on a serious
face, he proceeds to display his own wisdom to his admirers in what is often a long and
tedious composition. Now what is that sort of thing but a regular piece of authorship?
PHAEDRUS: True.
SOCRATES: And if the law is finally approved, then the author leaves the theatre in high
delight; but if the law is rejected and he is done out of his speech-making, and not
thought good enough to write, then he and his party are in mourning.
PHAEDRUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: So far are they from despising, or rather so highly do they value the practice
of writing.
PHAEDRUS: No doubt.
SOCRATES: And when the king or orator has the power, as Lycurgus or Solon or Darius
had, of attaining an immortality or authorship in a state, is he not thought by posterity,
when they see his compositions, and does he not think himself, while he is yet alive, to
be a god?
PHAEDRUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: Then do you think that any one of this class, however ill- disposed, would
reproach Lysias with being an author?
PHAEDRUS: Not upon your view; for according to you he would be casting a slur upon
his own favourite pursuit.
SOCRATES: Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing.
PHAEDRUS: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.
PHAEDRUS: Clearly.
SOCRATES: And what is well and what is badly—need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or
orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out
of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?
PHAEDRUS: Need we? For what should a man live if not for the pleasures of discourse?
Surely not for the sake of bodily pleasures, which almost always have previous pain as a
condition of them, and therefore are rightly called slavish.
SOCRATES: There is time enough. And I believe that the grasshoppers chirruping after
their manner in the heat of the sun over our heads are talking to one another and
looking down at us. What would they say if they saw that we, like the many, are not
conversing, but slumbering at mid-day, lulled by their voices, too indolent to think?
Would they not have a right to laugh at us? They might imagine that we were slaves,
who, coming to rest at a place of resort of theirs, like sheep lie asleep at noon around
the well. But if they see us discoursing, and like Odysseus sailing past them, deaf to their
siren voices, they may perhaps, out of respect, give us of the gifts which they receive
from the gods that they may impart them to men.
PHAEDRUS: What gifts do you mean? I never heard of any.
SOCRATES: A lover of music like yourself ought surely to have heard the story of the
grasshoppers, who are said to have been human beings in an age before the Muses.
And when the Muses came and song appeared they were ravished with delight; and
singing always, never thought of eating and drinking, until at last in their forgetfulness
they died. And now they live again in the grasshoppers; and this is the return which the
Muses make to them—they neither hunger, nor thirst, but from the hour of their birth
are always singing, and never eating or drinking; and when they die they go and inform
the Muses in heaven who honours them on earth. They win the love of Terpsichore for
the dancers by their report of them; of Erato for the lovers, and of the other Muses for
those who do them honour, according to the several ways of honouring them;—of
Calliope the eldest Muse and of Urania who is next to her, for the philosophers, of
whose music the grasshoppers make report to them; for these are the Muses who are
chiefly concerned with heaven and thought, divine as well as human, and they have the
sweetest utterance. For many reasons, then, we ought always to talk and not to sleep at
mid-day.
PHAEDRUS: Let us talk.
SOCRATES: Shall we discuss the rules of writing and speech as we were proposing?
PHAEDRUS: Very good.
SOCRATES: In good speaking should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the
matter about which he is going to speak?
PHAEDRUS: And yet, Socrates, I have heard that he who would be an orator has nothing
to do with true justice, but only with that which is likely to be approved by the many
who sit in judgment; nor with the truly good or honourable, but only with opinion about
them, and that from opinion comes persuasion, and not from the truth.
SOCRATES: The words of the wise are not to be set aside; for there is probably
something in them; and therefore the meaning of this saying is not hastily to be
dismissed.
PHAEDRUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: Let us put the matter thus:—Suppose that I persuaded you to buy a horse
and go to the wars. Neither of us knew what a horse was like, but I knew that you
believed a horse to be of tame animals the one which has the longest ears.
PHAEDRUS: That would be ridiculous.
SOCRATES: There is something more ridiculous coming:—Suppose, further, that in sober
earnest I, having persuaded you of this, went and composed a speech in honour of an
ass, whom I entitled a horse beginning: ‘A noble animal and a most useful possession,
especially in war, and you may get on his back and fight, and he will carry baggage or
anything.’
PHAEDRUS: How ridiculous!
SOCRATES: Ridiculous! Yes; but is not even a ridiculous friend better than a cunning
enemy?
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And when the orator instead of putting an ass in the place of a horse, puts
good for evil, being himself as ignorant of their true nature as the city on which he
imposes is ignorant; and having studied the notions of the multitude, falsely persuades
them not about ‘the shadow of an ass,’ which he confounds with a horse, but about
good which he confounds with evil,—what will be the harvest which rhetoric will be
likely to gather after the sowing of that seed?
PHAEDRUS: The reverse of good.
SOCRATES: But perhaps rhetoric has been getting too roughly handled by us, and she
might answer: What amazing nonsense you are talking! As if I forced any man to learn
to speak in ignorance of the truth! Whatever my advice may be worth, I should have told
him to arrive at the truth first, and then come to me. At the same time I boldly assert
that mere knowledge of the truth will not give you the art of persuasion.
PHAEDRUS: There is reason in the lady’s defence of herself.
SOCRATES: Quite true; if only the other arguments which remain to be brought up bear
her witness that she is an art at all. But I seem to hear them arraying themselves on the
opposite side, declaring that she speaks falsely, and that rhetoric is a mere routine and
trick, not an art. Lo! a Spartan appears, and says that there never is nor ever will be a real
art of speaking which is divorced from the truth.
PHAEDRUS: And what are these arguments, Socrates? Bring them out that we may
examine them.
SOCRATES: Come out, fair children, and convince Phaedrus, who is the father of similar
beauties, that he will never be able to speak about anything as he ought to speak unless
he have a knowledge of philosophy. And let Phaedrus answer you.
PHAEDRUS: Put the question.
SOCRATES: Is not rhetoric, taken generally, a universal art of enchanting the mind by
arguments; which is practised not only in courts and public assemblies, but in private
houses also, having to do with all matters, great as well as small, good and bad alike,
and is in all equally right, and equally to be esteemed—that is what you have heard?
PHAEDRUS: Nay, not exactly that; I should say rather that I have heard the art confined
to speaking and writing in lawsuits, and to speaking in public assemblies—not extended
farther.
SOCRATES: Then I suppose that you have only heard of the rhetoric of Nestor and
Odysseus, which they composed in their leisure hours when at Troy, and never of the
rhetoric of Palamedes?
PHAEDRUS: No more than of Nestor and Odysseus, unless Gorgias is your Nestor, and
Thrasymachus or Theodorus your Odysseus.
SOCRATES: Perhaps that is my meaning. But let us leave them. And do you tell me,
instead, what are plaintiff and defendant doing in a law court— are they not
contending?
PHAEDRUS: Exactly so.
SOCRATES: About the just and unjust—that is the matter in dispute?
PHAEDRUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: And a professor of the art will make the same thing appear to the same
persons to be at one time just, at another time, if he is so inclined, to be unjust?
PHAEDRUS: Exactly.
SOCRATES: And when he speaks in the assembly, he will make the same things seem
good to the city at one time, and at another time the reverse of good?
PHAEDRUS: That is true.
SOCRATES: Have we not heard of the Eleatic Palamedes (Zeno), who has an art of
speaking by which he makes the same things appear to his hearers like and unlike, one
and many, at rest and in motion?
PHAEDRUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: The art of disputation, then, is not confined to the courts and the assembly,
but is one and the same in every use of language; this is the art, if there be such an art,
which is able to find a likeness of everything to which a likeness can be found, and
draws into the light of day the likenesses and disguises which are used by others?
PHAEDRUS: How do you mean?
SOCRATES: Let me put the matter thus: When will there be more chance of deception—
when the difference is large or small?
PHAEDRUS: When the difference is small.
SOCRATES: And you will be less likely to be discovered in passing by degrees into the
other extreme than when you go all at once?
PHAEDRUS: Of course.
SOCRATES: He, then, who would deceive others, and not be deceived, must exactly
know the real likenesses and differences of things?
PHAEDRUS: He must.
SOCRATES: And if he is ignorant of the true nature of any subject, how can he detect the
greater or less degree of likeness in other things to that of which by the hypothesis he is
ignorant?
PHAEDRUS: He cannot.
SOCRATES: And when men are deceived and their notions are at variance with realities,
it is clear that the error slips in through resemblances?
PHAEDRUS: Yes, that is the way.
SOCRATES: Then he who would be a master of the art must understand the real nature
of everything; or he will never know either how to make the gradual departure from
truth into the opposite of truth which is effected by the help of resemblances, or how to
avoid it?
PHAEDRUS: He will not.
SOCRATES: He then, who being ignorant of the truth aims at appearances, will only
attain an art of rhetoric which is ridiculous and is not an art at all?
PHAEDRUS: That may be expected.
SOCRATES: Shall I propose that we look for examples of art and want of art, according
to our notion of them, in the speech of Lysias which you have in your hand, and in my
own speech?
PHAEDRUS: Nothing could be better; and indeed I think that our previous argument has
been too abstract and wanting in illustrations.
SOCRATES: Yes; and the two speeches happen to afford a very good example of the way
in which the speaker who knows the truth may, without any serious purpose, steal away
the hearts of his hearers. This piece of good- fortune I attribute to the local deities; and,
perhaps, the prophets of the Muses who are singing over our heads may have imparted
their inspiration to me. For I do not imagine that I have any rhetorical art of my own.
PHAEDRUS: Granted; if you will only please to get on.
SOCRATES: Suppose that you read me the first words of Lysias’ speech.
PHAEDRUS: ‘You know how matters stand with me, and how, as I conceive, they might
be arranged for our common interest; and I maintain that I ought not to fail in my suit,
because I am not your lover. For lovers repent—’
SOCRATES: Enough:—Now, shall I point out the rhetorical error of those words?
PHAEDRUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Every one is aware that about some things we are agreed, whereas about
other things we differ.
PHAEDRUS: I think that I understand you; but will you explain yourself?
SOCRATES: When any one speaks of iron and silver, is not the same thing present in the
minds of all?
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: But when any one speaks of justice and goodness we part company and are
at odds with one another and with ourselves?
PHAEDRUS: Precisely.
SOCRATES: Then in some things we agree, but not in others?
PHAEDRUS: That is true.
SOCRATES: In which are we more likely to be deceived, and in which has rhetoric the
greater power?
PHAEDRUS: Clearly, in the uncertain class.
SOCRATES: Then the rhetorician ought to make a regular division, and acquire a distinct
notion of both classes, as well of that in which the many err, as of that in which they do
not err?
PHAEDRUS: He who made such a distinction would have an excellent principle.
SOCRATES: Yes; and in the next place he must have a keen eye for the observation of
particulars in speaking, and not make a mistake about the class to which they are to be
referred.
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Now to which class does love belong—to the debatable or to the
undisputed class?
PHAEDRUS: To the debatable, clearly; for if not, do you think that love would have
allowed you to say as you did, that he is an evil both to the lover and the beloved, and
also the greatest possible good?
SOCRATES: Capital. But will you tell me whether I defined love at the beginning of my
speech? for, having been in an ecstasy, I cannot well remember.
PHAEDRUS: Yes, indeed; that you did, and no mistake.
SOCRATES: Then I perceive that the Nymphs of Achelous and Pan the son of Hermes,
who inspired me, were far better rhetoricians than Lysias the son of Cephalus. Alas! how
inferior to them he is! But perhaps I am mistaken; and Lysias at the commencement of
his lover’s speech did insist on our supposing love to be something or other which he
fancied him to be, and according to this model he fashioned and framed the remainder
of his discourse. Suppose we read his beginning over again:
PHAEDRUS: If you please; but you will not find what you want.
SOCRATES: Read, that I may have his exact words.
PHAEDRUS: ‘You know how matters stand with me, and how, as I conceive, they might
be arranged for our common interest; and I maintain I ought not to fail in my suit
because I am not your lover, for lovers repent of the kindnesses which they have shown,
when their love is over.’
SOCRATES: Here he appears to have done just the reverse of what he ought; for he has
begun at the end, and is swimming on his back through the flood to the place of
starting. His address to the fair youth begins where the lover would have ended. Am I
not right, sweet Phaedrus?
PHAEDRUS: Yes, indeed, Socrates; he does begin at the end.
SOCRATES: Then as to the other topics—are they not thrown down anyhow? Is there
any principle in them? Why should the next topic follow next in order, or any other
topic? I cannot help fancying in my ignorance that he wrote off boldly just what came
into his head, but I dare say that you would recognize a rhetorical necessity in the
succession of the several parts of the composition?
PHAEDRUS: You have too good an opinion of me if you think that I have any such
insight into his principles of composition.
SOCRATES: At any rate, you will allow that every discourse ought to be a living creature,
having a body of its own and a head and feet; there should be a middle, beginning, and
end, adapted to one another and to the whole?
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Can this be said of the discourse of Lysias? See whether you can find any
more connexion in his words than in the epitaph which is said by some to have been
inscribed on the grave of Midas the Phrygian.
PHAEDRUS: What is there remarkable in the epitaph?
SOCRATES: It is as follows:—
‘I am a maiden of bronze and lie on the tomb of Midas; So long as water flows and tall
trees grow, So long here on this spot by his sad tomb abiding, I shall declare to passersby
that Midas sleeps below.’
Now in this rhyme whether a line comes first or comes last, as you will perceive, makes
no difference.
PHAEDRUS: You are making fun of that oration of ours.
SOCRATES: Well, I will say no more about your friend’s speech lest I should give offence
to you; although I think that it might furnish many other examples of what a man ought
rather to avoid. But I will proceed to the other speech, which, as I think, is also
suggestive to students of rhetoric.
PHAEDRUS: In what way?
SOCRATES: The two speeches, as you may remember, were unlike; the one argued that
the lover and the other that the non-lover ought to be accepted.
PHAEDRUS: And right manfully.
SOCRATES: You should rather say ‘madly;’ and madness was the argument of them, for,
as I said, ‘love is a madness.’
PHAEDRUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: And of madness there were two kinds; one produced by human infirmity,
the other was a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.
PHAEDRUS: True.
SOCRATES: The divine madness was subdivided into four kinds, prophetic, initiatory,
poetic, erotic, having four gods presiding over them; the first was the inspiration of
Apollo, the second that of Dionysus, the third that of the Muses, the fourth that of
Aphrodite and Eros. In the description of the last kind of madness, which was also said
to be the best, we spoke of the affection of love in a figure, into which we introduced a
tolerably credible and possibly true though partly erring myth, which was also a hymn in
honour of Love, who is your lord and also mine, Phaedrus, and the guardian of fair
children, and to him we sung the hymn in measured and solemn strain.
PHAEDRUS: I know that I had great pleasure in listening to you.
SOCRATES: Let us take this instance and note how the transition was made from blame
to praise.
PHAEDRUS: What do you mean?
SOCRATES: I mean to say that the composition was mostly playful. Yet in these chance
fancies of the hour were involved two principles of which we should be too glad to have
a clearer description if art could give us one.
PHAEDRUS: What are they?
SOCRATES: First, the comprehension of scattered particulars in one idea; as in our
definition of love, which whether true or false certainly gave clearness and consistency
to the discourse, the speaker should define his several notions and so make his meaning
clear.
PHAEDRUS: What is the other principle, Socrates?
SOCRATES: The second principle is that of division into species according to the natural
formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver might. Just as our
two discourses, alike assumed, first of all, a single form of unreason; and then, as the
body which from being one becomes double and may be divided into a left side and
right side, each having parts right and left of the same name—after this manner the
speaker proceeded to divide the parts of the left side and did not desist until he found
in them an evil or left-handed love which he justly reviled; and the other discourse
leading us to the madness which lay on the right side, found another love, also having
the same name, but divine, which the speaker held up before us and applauded and
affirmed to be the author of the greatest benefits.
PHAEDRUS: Most true.
SOCRATES: I am myself a great lover of these processes of division and generalization;
they help me to speak and to think. And if I find any man who is able to see ‘a One and
Many’ in nature, him I follow, and ‘walk in his footsteps as if he were a god.’ And those
who have this art, I have hitherto been in the habit of calling dialecticians; but God
knows whether the name is right or not. And I should like to know what name you
would give to your or to Lysias’ disciples, and whether this may not be that famous art
of rhetoric which Thrasymachus and others teach and practise? Skilful speakers they are,
and impart their skill to any who is willing to make kings of them and to bring gifts to
them.
PHAEDRUS: Yes, they are royal men; but their art is not the same with the art of those
whom you call, and rightly, in my opinion, dialecticians:— Still we are in the dark about
rhetoric.
SOCRATES: What do you mean? The remains of it, if there be anything remaining which
can be brought under rules of art, must be a fine thing; and, at any rate, is not to be
despised by you and me. But how much is left?
PHAEDRUS: There is a great deal surely to be found in books of rhetoric?
SOCRATES: Yes; thank you for reminding me:—There is the exordium, showing how the
speech should begin, if I remember rightly; that is what you mean— the niceties of the
art?
PHAEDRUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Then follows the statement of facts, and upon that witnesses; thirdly, proofs;
fourthly, probabilities are to come; the great Byzantian word-maker also speaks, if I am
not mistaken, of confirmation and further confirmation.
PHAEDRUS: You mean the excellent Theodorus.
SOCRATES: Yes; and he tells how refutation or further refutation is to be managed,
whether in accusation or defence. I ought also to mention the illustrious Parian, Evenus,
who first invented insinuations and indirect praises; and also indirect censures, which
according to some he put into verse to help the memory. But shall I ‘to dumb
forgetfulness consign’ Tisias and Gorgias, who are not ignorant that probability is
superior to truth, and who by force of argument make the little appear great and the
great little, disguise the new in old fashions and the old in new fashions, and have
discovered forms for everything, either short or going on to infinity. I remember
Prodicus laughing when I told him of this; he said that he had himself discovered the
true rule of art, which was to be neither long nor short, but of a convenient length.
PHAEDRUS: Well done, Prodicus!
SOCRATES: Then there is Hippias the Elean stranger, who probably agrees with him.
PHAEDRUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: And there is also Polus, who has treasuries of diplasiology, and gnomology,
and eikonology, and who teaches in them the names of which Licymnius made him a
present; they were to give a polish.
PHAEDRUS: Had not Protagoras something of the same sort?
SOCRATES: Yes, rules of correct diction and many other fine precepts; for the ‘sorrows of
a poor old man,’ or any other pathetic case, no one is better than the Chalcedonian
giant; he can put a whole company of people into a passion and out of one again by his
mighty magic, and is first-rate at inventing or disposing of any sort of calumny on any
grounds or none. All of them agree in asserting that a speech should end in a
recapitulation, though they do not all agree to use the same word.
PHAEDRUS: You mean that there should be a summing up of the arguments in order to
remind the hearers of them.
SOCRATES: I have now said all that I have to say of the art of rhetoric: have you anything
to add?
PHAEDRUS: Not much; nothing very important.
SOCRATES: Leave the unimportant and let us bring the really important question into
the light of day, which is: What power has this art of rhetoric, and when?
PHAEDRUS: A very great power in public meetings.
SOCRATES: It has. But I should like to know whether you have the same feeling as I have
about the rhetoricians? To me there seem to be a great many holes in their web.
PHAEDRUS: Give an example.
SOCRATES: I will. Suppose a person to come to your friend Eryximachus, or to his father
Acumenus, and to say to him: ‘I know how to apply drugs which shall have either a
heating or a cooling effect, and I can give a vomit and also a purge, and all that sort of
thing; and knowing all this, as I do, I claim to be a physician and to make physicians by
imparting this knowledge to others,’—what do you suppose that they would say?
PHAEDRUS: They would be sure to ask him whether he knew ‘to whom’ he would give
his medicines, and ‘when,’ and ‘how much.’
SOCRATES: And suppose that he were to reply: ‘No; I know nothing of all that; I expect
the patient who consults me to be able to do these things for himself’?
PHAEDRUS: They would say in reply that he is a madman or a pedant who fancies that
he is a physician because he has read something in a book, or has stumbled on a
prescription or two, although he has no real understanding of the art of medicine.
SOCRATES: And suppose a person were to come to Sophocles or Euripides and say that
he knows how to make a very long speech about a small matter, and a short speech
about a great matter, and also a sorrowful speech, or a terrible, or threatening speech,
or any other kind of speech, and in teaching this fancies that he is teaching the art of
tragedy—?
PHAEDRUS: They too would surely laugh at him if he fancies that tragedy is anything but
the arranging of these elements in a manner which will be suitable to one another and
to the whole.
SOCRATES: But I do not suppose that they would be rude or abusive to him: Would they
not treat him as a musician a man who thinks that he is a harmonist because he knows
how to pitch the highest and lowest note; happening to meet such an one he would not
say to him savagely, ‘Fool, you are mad!’ But like a musician, in a gentle and harmonious
tone of voice, he would answer: ‘My good friend, he who would be a harmonist must
certainly know this, and yet he may understand nothing of harmony if he has not got
beyond your stage of knowledge, for you only know the preliminaries of harmony and
not harmony itself.’
PHAEDRUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: And will not Sophocles say to the display of the would-be tragedian, that
this is not tragedy but the preliminaries of tragedy? and will not Acumenus say the same
of medicine to the would-be physician?
PHAEDRUS: Quite true.
SOCRATES: And if Adrastus the mellifluous or Pericles heard of these wonderful arts,
brachylogies and eikonologies and all the hard names which we have been
endeavouring to draw into the light of day, what would they say? Instead of losing
temper and applying uncomplimentary epithets, as you and I have been doing, to the
authors of such an imaginary art, their superior wisdom would rather censure us, as well
as them. ‘Have a little patience, Phaedrus and Socrates, they would say; you should not
be in such a passion with those who from some want of dialectical skill are unable to
define the nature of rhetoric, and consequently suppose that they have found the art in
the preliminary conditions of it, and when these have been taught by them to others,
fancy that the whole art of rhetoric has been taught by them; but as to using the several
instruments of the art effectively, or making the composition a whole,—an application of
it such as this is they regard as an easy thing which their disciples may make for
themselves.’
PHAEDRUS: I quite admit, Socrates, that the art of rhetoric which these men teach and
of which they write is such as you describe—there I agree with you. But I still want to
know where and how the true art of rhetoric and persuasion is to be acquired.
SOCRATES: The perfection which is required of the finished orator is, or rather must be,
like the perfection of anything else; partly given by nature, but may also be assisted by
art. If you have the natural power and add to it knowledge and practice, you will be a
distinguished speaker; if you fall short in either of these, you will be to that extent
defective. But the art, as far as there is an art, of rhetoric does not lie in the direction of
Lysias or Thrasymachus.
PHAEDRUS: In what direction then?
SOCRATES: I conceive Pericles to have been the most accomplished of rhetoricians.
PHAEDRUS: What of that?
SOCRATES: All the great arts require discussion and high speculation about the truths of
nature; hence come loftiness of thought and completeness of execution. And this, as I
conceive, was the quality which, in addition to his natural gifts, Pericles acquired from
his intercourse with Anaxagoras whom he happened to know. He was thus imbued with
the higher philosophy, and attained the knowledge of Mind and the negative of Mind,
which were favourite themes of Anaxagoras, and applied what suited his purpose to the
art of speaking.
PHAEDRUS: Explain.
SOCRATES: Rhetoric is like medicine.
PHAEDRUS: How so?
SOCRATES: Why, because medicine has to define the nature of the body and rhetoric of
the soul—if we would proceed, not empirically but scientifically, in the one case to
impart health and strength by giving medicine and food, in the other to implant the
conviction or virtue which you desire, by the right application of words and training.
PHAEDRUS: There, Socrates, I suspect that you are right.
SOCRATES: And do you think that you can know the nature of the soul intelligently
without knowing the nature of the whole?
PHAEDRUS: Hippocrates the Asclepiad says that the nature even of the body can only
be understood as a whole. (Compare Charmides.)
SOCRATES: Yes, friend, and he was right:—still, we ought not to be content with the
name of Hippocrates, but to examine and see whether his argument agrees with his
conception of nature.
PHAEDRUS: I agree.
SOCRATES: Then consider what truth as well as Hippocrates says about this or about any
other nature. Ought we not to consider first whether that which we wish to learn and to
teach is a simple or multiform thing, and if simple, then to enquire what power it has of
acting or being acted upon in relation to other things, and if multiform, then to number
the forms; and see first in the case of one of them, and then in the case of all of them,
what is that power of acting or being acted upon which makes each and all of them to
be what they are?
PHAEDRUS: You may very likely be right, Socrates.
SOCRATES: The method which proceeds without analysis is like the groping of a blind
man. Yet, surely, he who is an artist ought not to admit of a comparison with the blind,
or deaf. The rhetorician, who teaches his pupil to speak scientifically, will particularly set
forth the nature of that being to which he addresses his speeches; and this, I conceive,
to be the soul.
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: His whole effort is directed to the soul; for in that he seeks to produce
conviction.
PHAEDRUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Then clearly, Thrasymachus or any one else who teaches rhetoric in earnest
will give an exact description of the nature of the soul; which will enable us to see
whether she be single and same, or, like the body, multiform. That is what we should call
showing the nature of the soul.
PHAEDRUS: Exactly.
SOCRATES: He will explain, secondly, the mode in which she acts or is acted upon.
PHAEDRUS: True.
SOCRATES: Thirdly, having classified men and speeches, and their kinds and affections,
and adapted them to one another, he will tell the reasons of his arrangement, and show
why one soul is persuaded by a particular form of argument, and another not.
PHAEDRUS: You have hit upon a very good way.
SOCRATES: Yes, that is the true and only way in which any subject can be set forth or
treated by rules of art, whether in speaking or writing. But the writers of the present day,
at whose feet you have sat, craftily conceal the nature of the soul which they know quite
well. Nor, until they adopt our method of reading and writing, can we admit that they
write by rules of art?
PHAEDRUS: What is our method?
SOCRATES: I cannot give you the exact details; but I should like to tell you generally, as
far as is in my power, how a man ought to proceed according to rules of art.
PHAEDRUS: Let me hear.
SOCRATES: Oratory is the art of enchanting the soul, and therefore he who would be an
orator has to learn the differences of human souls—they are so many and of such a
nature, and from them come the differences between man and man. Having proceeded
thus far in his analysis, he will next divide speeches into their different classes:—‘Such
and such persons,’ he will say, are affected by this or that kind of speech in this or that
way,’ and he will tell you why. The pupil must have a good theoretical notion of them
first, and then he must have experience of them in actual life, and be able to follow
them with all his senses about him, or he will never get beyond the precepts of his
masters. But when he understands what persons are persuaded by what arguments, and
sees the person about whom he was speaking in the abstract actually before him, and
knows that it is he, and can say to himself, ‘This is the man or this is the character who
ought to have a certain argument applied to him in order to convince him of a certain
opinion;’—he who knows all this, and knows also when he should speak and when he
should refrain, and when he should use pithy sayings, pathetic appeals, sensational
effects, and all the other modes of speech which he has learned;—when, I say, he knows
the times and seasons of all these things, then, and not till then, he is a perfect master of
his art; but if he fail in any of these points, whether in speaking or teaching or writing
them, and yet declares that he speaks by rules of art, he who says ‘I don’t believe you’
has the better of him. Well, the teacher will say, is this, Phaedrus and Socrates, your
account of the so-called art of rhetoric, or am I to look for another?
PHAEDRUS: He must take this, Socrates, for there is no possibility of another, and yet
the creation of such an art is not easy.
SOCRATES: Very true; and therefore let us consider this matter in every light, and see
whether we cannot find a shorter and easier road; there is no use in taking a long rough
roundabout way if there be a shorter and easier one. And I wish that you would try and
remember whether you have heard from Lysias or any one else anything which might be
of service to us.
PHAEDRUS: If trying would avail, then I might; but at the moment I can think of nothing.
SOCRATES: Suppose I tell you something which somebody who knows told me.
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: May not ‘the wolf,’ as the proverb says, ‘claim a hearing’?
PHAEDRUS: Do you say what can be said for him.
SOCRATES: He will argue that there is no use in putting a solemn face on these matters,
or in going round and round, until you arrive at first principles; for, as I said at first, when
the question is of justice and good, or is a question in which men are concerned who
are just and good, either by nature or habit, he who would be a skilful rhetorician has no
need of truth—for that in courts of law men literally care nothing about truth, but only
about conviction: and this is based on probability, to which he who would be a skilful
orator should therefore give his whole attention. And they say also that there are cases
in which the actual facts, if they are improbable, ought to be withheld, and only the
probabilities should be told either in accusation or defence, and that always in speaking,
the orator should keep probability in view, and say good-bye to the truth. And the
observance of this principle throughout a speech furnishes the whole art.
PHAEDRUS: That is what the professors of rhetoric do actually say, Socrates. I have not
forgotten that we have quite briefly touched upon this matter already; with them the
point is all-important.
SOCRATES: I dare say that you are familiar with Tisias. Does he not define probability to
be that which the many think?
PHAEDRUS: Certainly, he does.
SOCRATES: I believe that he has a clever and ingenious case of this sort: —He supposes
a feeble and valiant man to have assaulted a strong and cowardly one, and to have
robbed him of his coat or of something or other; he is brought into court, and then
Tisias says that both parties should tell lies: the coward should say that he was assaulted
by more men than one; the other should prove that they were alone, and should argue
thus: ‘How could a weak man like me have assaulted a strong man like him?’ The
complainant will not like to confess his own cowardice, and will therefore invent some
other lie which his adversary will thus gain an opportunity of refuting. And there are
other devices of the same kind which have a place in the system. Am I not right,
Phaedrus?
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Bless me, what a wonderfully mysterious art is this which Tisias or some
other gentleman, in whatever name or country he rejoices, has discovered. Shall we say
a word to him or not?
PHAEDRUS: What shall we say to him?
SOCRATES: Let us tell him that, before he appeared, you and I were saying that the
probability of which he speaks was engendered in the minds of the many by the likeness
of the truth, and we had just been affirming that he who knew the truth would always
know best how to discover the resemblances of the truth. If he has anything else to say
about the art of speaking we should like to hear him; but if not, we are satisfied with our
own view, that unless a man estimates the various characters of his hearers and is able
to divide all things into classes and to comprehend them under single ideas, he will
never be a skilful rhetorician even within the limits of human power. And this skill he will
not attain without a great deal of trouble, which a good man ought to undergo, not for
the sake of speaking and acting before men, but in order that he may be able to say
what is acceptable to God and always to act acceptably to Him as far as in him lies; for
there is a saying of wiser men than ourselves, that a man of sense should not try to
please his fellow-servants (at least this should not be his first object) but his good and
noble masters; and therefore if the way is long and circuitous, marvel not at this, for,
where the end is great, there we may take the longer road, but not for lesser ends such
as yours. Truly, the argument may say, Tisias, that if you do not mind going so far,
rhetoric has a fair beginning here.
PHAEDRUS: I think, Socrates, that this is admirable, if only practicable.
SOCRATES: But even to fail in an honourable object is honourable.
PHAEDRUS: True.
SOCRATES: Enough appears to have been said by us of a true and false art of speaking.
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing.
PHAEDRUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Do you know how you can speak or act about rhetoric in a manner which
will be acceptable to God?
PHAEDRUS: No, indeed. Do you?
SOCRATES: I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know;
although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much
about the opinions of men?
PHAEDRUS: Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you
say that you have heard.
SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name
was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of
many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and
draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the
god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city
of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by
them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other
Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and
Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured
others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all
that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came
to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better
memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most
ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the
utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you
who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to
attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create
forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will
trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific
which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give
your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many
things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will
generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom
without the reality.
PHAEDRUS: Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country.
SOCRATES: There was a tradition in the temple of Dodona that oaks first gave prophetic
utterances. The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to young philosophy, deemed that
if they heard the truth even from ‘oak or rock,’ it was enough for them; whereas you
seem to consider not whether a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is and from
what country the tale comes.
PHAEDRUS: I acknowledge the justice of your rebuke; and I think that the Theban is
right in his view about letters.
SOCRATES: He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of
Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the
idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing
was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?
PHAEDRUS: That is most true.
SOCRATES: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for
the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question
they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would
imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question
to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have
been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or
may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and,
if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot
protect or defend themselves.
PHAEDRUS: That again is most true.
SOCRATES: Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having
far greater power—a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?
PHAEDRUS: Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?
SOCRATES: I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can
defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.
PHAEDRUS: You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the
written word is properly no more than an image?
SOCRATES: Yes, of course that is what I mean. And now may I be allowed to ask you a
question: Would a husbandman, who is a man of sense, take the seeds, which he values
and which he wishes to bear fruit, and in sober seriousness plant them during the heat
of summer, in some garden of Adonis, that he may rejoice when he sees them in eight
days appearing in beauty? at least he would do so, if at all, only for the sake of
amusement and pastime. But when he is in earnest he sows in fitting soil, and practises
husbandry, and is satisfied if in eight months the seeds which he has sown arrive at
perfection?
PHAEDRUS: Yes, Socrates, that will be his way when he is in earnest; he will do the other,
as you say, only in play.
SOCRATES: And can we suppose that he who knows the just and good and honourable
has less understanding, than the husbandman, about his own seeds?
PHAEDRUS: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: Then he will not seriously incline to ‘write’ his thoughts ‘in water’ with pen
and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth
adequately to others?
PHAEDRUS: No, that is not likely.
SOCRATES: No, that is not likely—in the garden of letters he will sow and plant, but only
for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write them down as memorials to be
treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who
is treading the same path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while
others are refreshing their souls with banqueting and the like, this will be the pastime in
which his days are spent.
PHAEDRUS: A pastime, Socrates, as noble as the other is ignoble, the pastime of a man
who can be amused by serious talk, and can discourse merrily about justice and the like.
SOCRATES: True, Phaedrus. But nobler far is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who,
finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are
able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in
them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the
possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness.
PHAEDRUS: Far nobler, certainly.
SOCRATES: And now, Phaedrus, having agreed upon the premises we may decide about
the conclusion.
PHAEDRUS: About what conclusion?
SOCRATES: About Lysias, whom we censured, and his art of writing, and his discourses,
and the rhetorical skill or want of skill which was shown in them—these are the
questions which we sought to determine, and they brought us to this point. And I think
that we are now pretty well informed about the nature of art and its opposite.
PHAEDRUS: Yes, I think with you; but I wish that you would repeat what was said.
SOCRATES: Until a man knows the truth of the several particulars of which he is writing
or speaking, and is able to define them as they are, and having defined them again to
divide them until they can be no longer divided, and until in like manner he is able to
discern the nature of the soul, and discover the different modes of discourse which are
adapted to different natures, and to arrange and dispose them in such a way that the
simple form of speech may be addressed to the simpler nature, and the complex and
composite to the more complex nature—until he has accomplished all this, he will be
unable to handle arguments according to rules of art, as far as their nature allows them
to be subjected to art, either for the purpose of teaching or persuading;—such is the
view which is implied in the whole preceding argument.
PHAEDRUS: Yes, that was our view, certainly.
SOCRATES: Secondly, as to the censure which was passed on the speaking or writing of
discourses, and how they might be rightly or wrongly censured— did not our previous
argument show—?
PHAEDRUS: Show what?
SOCRATES: That whether Lysias or any other writer that ever was or will be, whether
private man or statesman, proposes laws and so becomes the author of a political
treatise, fancying that there is any great certainty and clearness in his performance, the
fact of his so writing is only a disgrace to him, whatever men may say. For not to know
the nature of justice and injustice, and good and evil, and not to be able to distinguish
the dream from the reality, cannot in truth be otherwise than disgraceful to him, even
though he have the applause of the whole world.
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: But he who thinks that in the written word there is necessarily much which is
not serious, and that neither poetry nor prose, spoken or written, is of any great value, if,
like the compositions of the rhapsodes, they are only recited in order to be believed,
and not with any view to criticism or instruction; and who thinks that even the best of
writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice
and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction
and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection
and seriousness, and that such principles are a man’s own and his legitimate offspring;—
being, in the first place, the word which he finds in his own bosom; secondly, the
brethren and descendants and relations of his idea which have been duly implanted by
him in the souls of others;—and who cares for them and no others—this is the right sort
of man; and you and I, Phaedrus, would pray that we may become like him.
PHAEDRUS: That is most assuredly my desire and prayer.
SOCRATES: And now the play is played out; and of rhetoric enough. Go and tell Lysias
that to the fountain and school of the Nymphs we went down, and were bidden by
them to convey a message to him and to other composers of speeches—to Homer and
other writers of poems, whether set to music or not; and to Solon and others who have
composed writings in the form of political discourses which they would term laws—to all
of them we are to say that if their compositions are based on knowledge of the truth,
and they can defend or prove them, when they are put to the test, by spoken
arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison of them, then they are to be
called, not only poets, orators, legislators, but are worthy of a higher name, befitting the
serious pursuit of their life.
PHAEDRUS: What name would you assign to them?
SOCRATES: Wise, I may not call them; for that is a great name which belongs to God
alone,—lovers of wisdom or philosophers is their modest and befitting title.
PHAEDRUS: Very suitable.
SOCRATES: And he who cannot rise above his own compilations and compositions,
which he has been long patching and piecing, adding some and taking away some, may
be justly called poet or speech-maker or law-maker.
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Now go and tell this to your companion.
PHAEDRUS: But there is also a friend of yours who ought not to be forgotten.
SOCRATES: Who is he?
PHAEDRUS: Isocrates the fair:—What message will you send to him, and how shall we
describe him?
SOCRATES: Isocrates is still young, Phaedrus; but I am willing to hazard a prophecy
concerning him.
PHAEDRUS: What would you prophesy?
SOCRATES: I think that he has a genius which soars above the orations of Lysias, and
that his character is cast in a finer mould. My impression of him is that he will
marvellously improve as he grows older, and that all former rhetoricians will be as
children in comparison of him. And I believe that he will not be satisfied with rhetoric,
but that there is in him a divine inspiration which will lead him to things higher still. For
he has an element of philosophy in his nature. This is the message of the gods dwelling
in this place, and which I will myself deliver to Isocrates, who is my delight; and do you
give the other to Lysias, who is yours.
PHAEDRUS: I will; and now as the heat is abated let us depart.
SOCRATES: Should we not offer up a prayer first of all to the local deities?
PHAEDRUS: By all means.
SOCRATES: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in
the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise
to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he
only can bear and carry.—Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.
PHAEDRUS: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.
SOCRATES: Let us go.
THE END

The Symposium
BY
PLATO
TRANSLATED BY
BENJAMIN
JOWETT
INTRODUCTION.
Of all the works of Plato the Symposium is the most perfect in form, and may be truly
thought to contain more than any commentator has ever dreamed of; or, as Goethe said
of one of his own writings, more than the author himself knew. For in philosophy as in
prophecy glimpses of the future may often be conveyed in words which could hardly
have been understood or interpreted at the time when they were uttered (compare
Symp.)—which were wiser than the writer of them meant, and could not have been
expressed by him if he had been interrogated about them. Yet Plato was not a mystic,
nor in any degree affected by the Eastern influences which afterwards overspread the
Alexandrian world. He was not an enthusiast or a sentimentalist, but one who aspired
only to see reasoned truth, and whose thoughts are clearly explained in his language.
There is no foreign element either of Egypt or of Asia to be found in his writings. And
more than any other Platonic work the Symposium is Greek both in style and subject,
having a beauty ‘as of a statue,’ while the companion Dialogue of the Phaedrus is
marked by a sort of Gothic irregularity. More too than in any other of his Dialogues,
Plato is emancipated from former philosophies. The genius of Greek art seems to
triumph over the traditions of Pythagorean, Eleatic, or Megarian systems, and ‘the old
quarrel of poetry and philosophy’ has at least a superficial reconcilement. (Rep.)
An unknown person who had heard of the discourses in praise of love spoken by
Socrates and others at the banquet of Agathon is desirous of having an authentic
account of them, which he thinks that he can obtain from Apollodorus, the same
excitable, or rather ‘mad’ friend of Socrates, who is afterwards introduced in the Phaedo.
He had imagined that the discourses were recent. There he is mistaken: but they are still
fresh in the memory of his informant, who had just been repeating them to Glaucon,
and is quite prepared to have another rehearsal of them in a walk from the Piraeus to
Athens. Although he had not been present himself, he had heard them from the best
authority. Aristodemus, who is described as having been in past times a humble but
inseparable attendant of Socrates, had reported them to him (compare Xen. Mem.).
The narrative which he had heard was as follows:—
Aristodemus meeting Socrates in holiday attire, is invited by him to a banquet at the
house of Agathon, who had been sacrificing in thanksgiving for his tragic victory on the
day previous. But no sooner has he entered the house than he finds that he is alone;
Socrates has stayed behind in a fit of abstraction, and does not appear until the banquet
is half over. On his appearing he and the host jest a little; the question is then asked by
Pausanias, one of the guests, ‘What shall they do about drinking? as they had been all
well drunk on the day before, and drinking on two successive days is such a bad thing.’
This is confirmed by the authority of Eryximachus the physician, who further proposes
that instead of listening to the flute-girl and her ‘noise’ they shall make speeches in
honour of love, one after another, going from left to right in the order in which they are
reclining at the table. All of them agree to this proposal, and Phaedrus, who is the
‘father’ of the idea, which he has previously communicated to Eryximachus, begins as
follows:—
He descants first of all upon the antiquity of love, which is proved by the authority of the
poets; secondly upon the benefits which love gives to man. The greatest of these is the
sense of honour and dishonour. The lover is ashamed to be seen by the beloved doing
or suffering any cowardly or mean act. And a state or army which was made up only of
lovers and their loves would be invincible. For love will convert the veriest coward into
an inspired hero.
And there have been true loves not only of men but of women also. Such was the love
of Alcestis, who dared to die for her husband, and in recompense of her virtue was
allowed to come again from the dead. But Orpheus, the miserable harper, who went
down to Hades alive, that he might bring back his wife, was mocked with an apparition
only, and the gods afterwards contrived his death as the punishment of his
cowardliness. The love of Achilles, like that of Alcestis, was courageous and true; for he
was willing to avenge his lover Patroclus, although he knew that his own death would
immediately follow: and the gods, who honour the love of the beloved above that of the
lover, rewarded him, and sent him to the islands of the blest.
Pausanias, who was sitting next, then takes up the tale:—He says that Phaedrus should
have distinguished the heavenly love from the earthly, before he praised either. For
there are two loves, as there are two Aphrodites—one the daughter of Uranus, who has
no mother and is the elder and wiser goddess, and the other, the daughter of Zeus and
Dione, who is popular and common. The first of the two loves has a noble purpose, and
delights only in the intelligent nature of man, and is faithful to the end, and has no
shadow of wantonness or lust. The second is the coarser kind of love, which is a love of
the body rather than of the soul, and is of women and boys as well as of men. Now the
actions of lovers vary, like every other sort of action, according to the manner of their
performance. And in different countries there is a difference of opinion about male
loves. Some, like the Boeotians, approve of them; others, like the Ionians, and most of
the barbarians, disapprove of them; partly because they are aware of the political
dangers which ensue from them, as may be seen in the instance of Harmodius and
Aristogeiton. At Athens and Sparta there is an apparent contradiction about them. For at
times they are encouraged, and then the lover is allowed to play all sorts of fantastic
tricks; he may swear and forswear himself (and ‘at lovers’ perjuries they say Jove
laughs’); he may be a servant, and lie on a mat at the door of his love, without any loss
of character; but there are also times when elders look grave and guard their young
relations, and personal remarks are made. The truth is that some of these loves are
disgraceful and others honourable. The vulgar love of the body which takes wing and
flies away when the bloom of youth is over, is disgraceful, and so is the interested love
of power or wealth; but the love of the noble mind is lasting. The lover should be tested,
and the beloved should not be too ready to yield. The rule in our country is that the
beloved may do the same service to the lover in the way of virtue which the lover may
do to him.
A voluntary service to be rendered for the sake of virtue and wisdom is permitted
among us; and when these two customs—one the love of youth, the other the practice
of virtue and philosophy—meet in one, then the lovers may lawfully unite. Nor is there
any disgrace to a disinterested lover in being deceived: but the interested lover is
doubly disgraced, for if he loses his love he loses his character; whereas the noble love
of the other remains the same, although the object of his love is unworthy: for nothing
can be nobler than love for the sake of virtue. This is that love of the heavenly goddess
which is of great price to individuals and cities, making them work together for their
improvement.
The turn of Aristophanes comes next; but he has the hiccough, and therefore proposes
that Eryximachus the physician shall cure him or speak in his turn. Eryximachus is ready
to do both, and after prescribing for the hiccough, speaks as follows:—
He agrees with Pausanias in maintaining that there are two kinds of love; but his art has
led him to the further conclusion that the empire of this double love extends over all
things, and is to be found in animals and plants as well as in man. In the human body
also there are two loves; and the art of medicine shows which is the good and which is
the bad love, and persuades the body to accept the good and reject the bad, and
reconciles conflicting elements and makes them friends. Every art, gymnastic and
husbandry as well as medicine, is the reconciliation of opposites; and this is what
Heracleitus meant, when he spoke of a harmony of opposites: but in strictness he
should rather have spoken of a harmony which succeeds opposites, for an agreement of
disagreements there cannot be. Music too is concerned with the principles of love in
their application to harmony and rhythm. In the abstract, all is simple, and we are not
troubled with the twofold love; but when they are applied in education with their
accompaniments of song and metre, then the discord begins. Then the old tale has to
be repeated of fair Urania and the coarse Polyhymnia, who must be indulged sparingly,
just as in my own art of medicine care must be taken that the taste of the epicure be
gratified without inflicting upon him the attendant penalty of disease.
There is a similar harmony or disagreement in the course of the seasons and in the
relations of moist and dry, hot and cold, hoar frost and blight; and diseases of all sorts
spring from the excesses or disorders of the element of love. The knowledge of these
elements of love and discord in the heavenly bodies is termed astronomy, in the
relations of men towards gods and parents is called divination. For divination is the
peacemaker of gods and men, and works by a knowledge of the tendencies of merely
human loves to piety and impiety. Such is the power of love; and that love which is just
and temperate has the greatest power, and is the source of all our happiness and
friendship with the gods and with one another. I dare say that I have omitted to mention
many things which you, Aristophanes, may supply, as I perceive that you are cured of
the hiccough.
Aristophanes is the next speaker:—
He professes to open a new vein of discourse, in which he begins by treating of the
origin of human nature. The sexes were originally three, men, women, and the union of
the two; and they were made round—having four hands, four feet, two faces on a round
neck, and the rest to correspond. Terrible was their strength and swiftness; and they
were essaying to scale heaven and attack the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial
councils; the gods were divided between the desire of quelling the pride of man and the
fear of losing the sacrifices. At last Zeus hit upon an expedient. Let us cut them in two,
he said; then they will only have half their strength, and we shall have twice as many
sacrifices. He spake, and split them as you might split an egg with an hair; and when this
was done, he told Apollo to give their faces a twist and re-arrange their persons, taking
out the wrinkles and tying the skin in a knot about the navel. The two halves went about
looking for one another, and were ready to die of hunger in one another’s arms. Then
Zeus invented an adjustment of the sexes, which enabled them to marry and go their
way to the business of life. Now the characters of men differ accordingly as they are
derived from the original man or the original woman, or the original man-woman. Those
who come from the man-woman are lascivious and adulterous; those who come from
the woman form female attachments; those who are a section of the male follow the
male and embrace him, and in him all their desires centre. The pair are inseparable and
live together in pure and manly affection; yet they cannot tell what they want of one
another. But if Hephaestus were to come to them with his instruments and propose that
they should be melted into one and remain one here and hereafter, they would
acknowledge that this was the very expression of their want. For love is the desire of the
whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love. There was a time when the two sexes
were only one, but now God has halved them,—much as the Lacedaemonians have cut
up the Arcadians,—and if they do not behave themselves he will divide them again, and
they will hop about with half a nose and face in basso relievo. Wherefore let us exhort all
men to piety, that we may obtain the goods of which love is the author, and be
reconciled to God, and find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world. And
now I must beg you not to suppose that I am alluding to Pausanias and Agathon
(compare Protag.), for my words refer to all mankind everywhere.
Some raillery ensues first between Aristophanes and Eryximachus, and then between
Agathon, who fears a few select friends more than any number of spectators at the
theatre, and Socrates, who is disposed to begin an argument. This is speedily repressed
by Phaedrus, who reminds the disputants of their tribute to the god. Agathon’s speech
follows:—
He will speak of the god first and then of his gifts: He is the fairest and blessedest and
best of the gods, and also the youngest, having had no existence in the old days of
Iapetus and Cronos when the gods were at war. The things that were done then were
done of necessity and not of love. For love is young and dwells in soft places,—not like
Ate in Homer, walking on the skulls of men, but in their hearts and souls, which are soft
enough. He is all flexibility and grace, and his habitation is among the flowers, and he
cannot do or suffer wrong; for all men serve and obey him of their own free will, and
where there is love there is obedience, and where obedience, there is justice; for none
can be wronged of his own free will. And he is temperate as well as just, for he is the
ruler of the desires, and if he rules them he must be temperate. Also he is courageous,
for he is the conqueror of the lord of war. And he is wise too; for he is a poet, and the
author of poesy in others. He created the animals; he is the inventor of the arts; all the
gods are his subjects; he is the fairest and best himself, and the cause of what is fairest
and best in others; he makes men to be of one mind at a banquet, filling them with
affection and emptying them of disaffection; the pilot, helper, defender, saviour of men,
in whose footsteps let every man follow, chanting a strain of love. Such is the discourse,
half playful, half serious, which I dedicate to the god.
The turn of Socrates comes next. He begins by remarking satirically that he has not
understood the terms of the original agreement, for he fancied that they meant to speak
the true praises of love, but now he finds that they only say what is good of him,
whether true or false. He begs to be absolved from speaking falsely, but he is willing to
speak the truth, and proposes to begin by questioning Agathon. The result of his
questions may be summed up as follows:—
Love is of something, and that which love desires is not that which love is or has; for no
man desires that which he is or has. And love is of the beautiful, and therefore has not
the beautiful. And the beautiful is the good, and therefore, in wanting and desiring the
beautiful, love also wants and desires the good. Socrates professes to have asked the
same questions and to have obtained the same answers from Diotima, a wise woman of
Mantinea, who, like Agathon, had spoken first of love and then of his works. Socrates,
like Agathon, had told her that Love is a mighty god and also fair, and she had shown
him in return that Love was neither, but in a mean between fair and foul, good and evil,
and not a god at all, but only a great demon or intermediate power (compare the
speech of Eryximachus) who conveys to the gods the prayers of men, and to men the
commands of the gods.
Socrates asks: Who are his father and mother? To this Diotima replies that he is the son
of Plenty and Poverty, and partakes of the nature of both, and is full and starved by
turns. Like his mother he is poor and squalid, lying on mats at doors (compare the
speech of Pausanias); like his father he is bold and strong, and full of arts and resources.
Further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge:—in this he resembles the
philosopher who is also in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. Such is the nature
of Love, who is not to be confused with the beloved.
But Love desires the beautiful; and then arises the question, What does he desire of the
beautiful? He desires, of course, the possession of the beautiful;—but what is given by
that? For the beautiful let us substitute the good, and we have no difficulty in seeing the
possession of the good to be happiness, and Love to be the desire of happiness,
although the meaning of the word has been too often confined to one kind of love. And
Love desires not only the good, but the everlasting possession of the good. Why then is
there all this flutter and excitement about love? Because all men and women at a certain
age are desirous of bringing to the birth. And love is not of beauty only, but of birth in
beauty; this is the principle of immortality in a mortal creature. When beauty
approaches, then the conceiving power is benign and diffuse; when foulness, she is
averted and morose.
But why again does this extend not only to men but also to animals? Because they too
have an instinct of immortality. Even in the same individual there is a perpetual
succession as well of the parts of the material body as of the thoughts and desires of the
mind; nay, even knowledge comes and goes. There is no sameness of existence, but the
new mortality is always taking the place of the old. This is the reason why parents love
their children—for the sake of immortality; and this is why men love the immortality of
fame. For the creative soul creates not children, but conceptions of wisdom and virtue,
such as poets and other creators have invented. And the noblest creations of all are
those of legislators, in honour of whom temples have been raised. Who would not
sooner have these children of the mind than the ordinary human ones? (Compare
Bacon’s Essays, 8:—‘Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have
proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which both in affection and means
have married and endowed the public.’)
I will now initiate you, she said, into the greater mysteries; for he who would proceed in
due course should love first one fair form, and then many, and learn the connexion of
them; and from beautiful bodies he should proceed to beautiful minds, and the beauty
of laws and institutions, until he perceives that all beauty is of one kindred; and from
institutions he should go on to the sciences, until at last the vision is revealed to him of
a single science of universal beauty, and then he will behold the everlasting nature
which is the cause of all, and will be near the end. In the contemplation of that supreme
being of love he will be purified of earthly leaven, and will behold beauty, not with the
bodily eye, but with the eye of the mind, and will bring forth true creations of virtue and
wisdom, and be the friend of God and heir of immortality.
Such, Phaedrus, is the tale which I heard from the stranger of Mantinea, and which you
may call the encomium of love, or what you please.
The company applaud the speech of Socrates, and Aristophanes is about to say
something, when suddenly a band of revellers breaks into the court, and the voice of
Alcibiades is heard asking for Agathon. He is led in drunk, and welcomed by Agathon,
whom he has come to crown with a garland. He is placed on a couch at his side, but
suddenly, on recognizing Socrates, he starts up, and a sort of conflict is carried on
between them, which Agathon is requested to appease. Alcibiades then insists that they
shall drink, and has a large wine-cooler filled, which he first empties himself, and then
fills again and passes on to Socrates. He is informed of the nature of the entertainment;
and is ready to join, if only in the character of a drunken and disappointed lover he may
be allowed to sing the praises of Socrates:—
He begins by comparing Socrates first to the busts of Silenus, which have images of the
gods inside them; and, secondly, to Marsyas the flute-player. For Socrates produces the
same effect with the voice which Marsyas did with the flute. He is the great speaker and
enchanter who ravishes the souls of men; the convincer of hearts too, as he has
convinced Alcibiades, and made him ashamed of his mean and miserable life. Socrates
at one time seemed about to fall in love with him; and he thought that he would
thereby gain a wonderful opportunity of receiving lessons of wisdom. He narrates the
failure of his design. He has suffered agonies from him, and is at his wit’s end. He then
proceeds to mention some other particulars of the life of Socrates; how they were at
Potidaea together, where Socrates showed his superior powers of enduring cold and
fatigue; how on one occasion he had stood for an entire day and night absorbed in
reflection amid the wonder of the spectators; how on another occasion he had saved
Alcibiades’ life; how at the battle of Delium, after the defeat, he might be seen stalking
about like a pelican, rolling his eyes as Aristophanes had described him in the Clouds.
He is the most wonderful of human beings, and absolutely unlike anyone but a satyr.
Like the satyr in his language too; for he uses the commonest words as the outward
mask of the divinest truths.
When Alcibiades has done speaking, a dispute begins between him and Agathon and
Socrates. Socrates piques Alcibiades by a pretended affection for Agathon. Presently a
band of revellers appears, who introduce disorder into the feast; the sober part of the
company, Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others, withdraw; and Aristodemus, the follower
of Socrates, sleeps during the whole of a long winter’s night. When he wakes at
cockcrow the revellers are nearly all asleep. Only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon
hold out; they are drinking from a large goblet, which they pass round, and Socrates is
explaining to the two others, who are half-asleep, that the genius of tragedy is the same
as that of comedy, and that the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer of comedy also.
And first Aristophanes drops, and then, as the day is dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having
laid them to rest, takes a bath and goes to his daily avocations until the evening.
Aristodemus follows.
...
If it be true that there are more things in the Symposium of Plato than any commentator
has dreamed of, it is also true that many things have been imagined which are not really
to be found there. Some writings hardly admit of a more distinct interpretation than a
musical composition; and every reader may form his own accompaniment of thought or
feeling to the strain which he hears. The Symposium of Plato is a work of this character,
and can with difficulty be rendered in any words but the writer’s own. There are so many
half-lights and cross-lights, so much of the colour of mythology, and of the manner of
sophistry adhering—rhetoric and poetry, the playful and the serious, are so subtly
intermingled in it, and vestiges of old philosophy so curiously blend with germs of
future knowledge, that agreement among interpreters is not to be expected. The
expression ‘poema magis putandum quam comicorum poetarum,’ which has been
applied to all the writings of Plato, is especially applicable to the Symposium.
The power of love is represented in the Symposium as running through all nature and all
being: at one end descending to animals and plants, and attaining to the highest vision
of truth at the other. In an age when man was seeking for an expression of the world
around him, the conception of love greatly affected him. One of the first distinctions of
language and of mythology was that of gender; and at a later period the ancient
physicist, anticipating modern science, saw, or thought that he saw, a sex in plants; there
were elective affinities among the elements, marriages of earth and heaven. (Aesch.
Frag. Dan.) Love became a mythic personage whom philosophy, borrowing from poetry,
converted into an efficient cause of creation. The traces of the existence of love, as of
number and figure, were everywhere discerned; and in the Pythagorean list of opposites
male and female were ranged side by side with odd and even, finite and infinite.
But Plato seems also to be aware that there is a mystery of love in man as well as in
nature, extending beyond the mere immediate relation of the sexes. He is conscious that
the highest and noblest things in the world are not easily severed from the sensual
desires, or may even be regarded as a spiritualized form of them. We may observe that
Socrates himself is not represented as originally unimpassioned, but as one who has
overcome his passions; the secret of his power over others partly lies in his passionate
but self-controlled nature. In the Phaedrus and Symposium love is not merely the
feeling usually so called, but the mystical contemplation of the beautiful and the good.
The same passion which may wallow in the mire is capable of rising to the loftiest
heights—of penetrating the inmost secret of philosophy. The highest love is the love not
of a person, but of the highest and purest abstraction. This abstraction is the far-off
heaven on which the eye of the mind is fixed in fond amazement. The unity of truth, the
consistency of the warring elements of the world, the enthusiasm for knowledge when
first beaming upon mankind, the relativity of ideas to the human mind, and of the
human mind to ideas, the faith in the invisible, the adoration of the eternal nature, are
all included, consciously or unconsciously, in Plato’s doctrine of love.
The successive speeches in praise of love are characteristic of the speakers, and
contribute in various degrees to the final result; they are all designed to prepare the way
for Socrates, who gathers up the threads anew, and skims the highest points of each of
them. But they are not to be regarded as the stages of an idea, rising above one another
to a climax. They are fanciful, partly facetious performances, ‘yet also having a certain
measure of seriousness,’ which the successive speakers dedicate to the god. All of them
are rhetorical and poetical rather than dialectical, but glimpses of truth appear in them.
When Eryximachus says that the principles of music are simple in themselves, but
confused in their application, he touches lightly upon a difficulty which has troubled the
moderns as well as the ancients in music, and may be extended to the other applied
sciences. That confusion begins in the concrete, was the natural feeling of a mind
dwelling in the world of ideas. When Pausanias remarks that personal attachments are
inimical to despots. The experience of Greek history confirms the truth of his remark.
When Aristophanes declares that love is the desire of the whole, he expresses a feeling
not unlike that of the German philosopher, who says that ‘philosophy is home sickness.’
When Agathon says that no man ‘can be wronged of his own free will,’ he is alluding
playfully to a serious problem of Greek philosophy (compare Arist. Nic. Ethics). So
naturally does Plato mingle jest and earnest, truth and opinion in the same work.
The characters—of Phaedrus, who has been the cause of more philosophical discussions
than any other man, with the exception of Simmias the Theban (Phaedrus); of
Aristophanes, who disguises under comic imagery a serious purpose; of Agathon, who in
later life is satirized by Aristophanes in the Thesmophoriazusae, for his effeminate
manners and the feeble rhythms of his verse; of Alcibiades, who is the same strange
contrast of great powers and great vices, which meets us in history—are drawn to the
life; and we may suppose the less-known characters of Pausanias and Eryximachus to be
also true to the traditional recollection of them (compare Phaedr., Protag.; and compare
Sympos. with Phaedr.). We may also remark that Aristodemus is called ‘the little’ in
Xenophon’s Memorabilia (compare Symp.).
The speeches have been said to follow each other in pairs: Phaedrus and Pausanias
being the ethical, Eryximachus and Aristophanes the physical speakers, while in Agathon
and Socrates poetry and philosophy blend together. The speech of Phaedrus is also
described as the mythological, that of Pausanias as the political, that of Eryximachus as
the scientific, that of Aristophanes as the artistic (!), that of Socrates as the philosophical.
But these and similar distinctions are not found in Plato; —they are the points of view of
his critics, and seem to impede rather than to assist us in understanding him.
When the turn of Socrates comes round he cannot be allowed to disturb the
arrangement made at first. With the leave of Phaedrus he asks a few questions, and then
he throws his argument into the form of a speech (compare Gorg., Protag.). But his
speech is really the narrative of a dialogue between himself and Diotima. And as at a
banquet good manners would not allow him to win a victory either over his host or any
of the guests, the superiority which he gains over Agathon is ingeniously represented as
having been already gained over himself by her. The artifice has the further advantage
of maintaining his accustomed profession of ignorance (compare Menex.). Even his
knowledge of the mysteries of love, to which he lays claim here and elsewhere (Lys.), is
given by Diotima.
The speeches are attested to us by the very best authority. The madman Apollodorus,
who for three years past has made a daily study of the actions of Socrates—to whom
the world is summed up in the words ‘Great is Socrates’—he has heard them from
another ‘madman,’ Aristodemus, who was the ‘shadow’ of Socrates in days of old, like
him going about barefooted, and who had been present at the time. ‘Would you desire
better witness?’ The extraordinary narrative of Alcibiades is ingeniously represented as
admitted by Socrates, whose silence when he is invited to contradict gives consent to
the narrator. We may observe, by the way, (1) how the very appearance of Aristodemus
by himself is a sufficient indication to Agathon that Socrates has been left behind; also,
(2) how the courtesy of Agathon anticipates the excuse which Socrates was to have
made on Aristodemus’ behalf for coming uninvited; (3) how the story of the fit or trance
of Socrates is confirmed by the mention which Alcibiades makes of a similar fit of
abstraction occurring when he was serving with the army at Potidaea; like (4) the
drinking powers of Socrates and his love of the fair, which receive a similar attestation in
the concluding scene; or the attachment of Aristodemus, who is not forgotten when
Socrates takes his departure. (5) We may notice the manner in which Socrates himself
regards the first five speeches, not as true, but as fanciful and exaggerated encomiums
of the god Love; (6) the satirical character of them, shown especially in the appeals to
mythology, in the reasons which are given by Zeus for reconstructing the frame of man,
or by the Boeotians and Eleans for encouraging male loves; (7) the ruling passion of
Socrates for dialectics, who will argue with Agathon instead of making a speech, and will
only speak at all upon the condition that he is allowed to speak the truth. We may note
also the touch of Socratic irony, (8) which admits of a wide application and reveals a
deep insight into the world:—that in speaking of holy things and persons there is a
general understanding that you should praise them, not that you should speak the truth
about them—this is the sort of praise which Socrates is unable to give. Lastly, (9) we may
remark that the banquet is a real banquet after all, at which love is the theme of
discourse, and huge quantities of wine are drunk.
The discourse of Phaedrus is half-mythical, half-ethical; and he himself, true to the
character which is given him in the Dialogue bearing his name, is half-sophist, halfenthusiast.
He is the critic of poetry also, who compares Homer and Aeschylus in the
insipid and irrational manner of the schools of the day, characteristically reasoning
about the probability of matters which do not admit of reasoning. He starts from a
noble text: ‘That without the sense of honour and dishonour neither states nor
individuals ever do any good or great work.’ But he soon passes on to more commonplace
topics. The antiquity of love, the blessing of having a lover, the incentive which
love offers to daring deeds, the examples of Alcestis and Achilles, are the chief themes
of his discourse. The love of women is regarded by him as almost on an equality with
that of men; and he makes the singular remark that the gods favour the return of love
which is made by the beloved more than the original sentiment, because the lover is of
a nobler and diviner nature.
There is something of a sophistical ring in the speech of Phaedrus, which recalls the first
speech in imitation of Lysias, occurring in the Dialogue called the Phaedrus. This is still
more marked in the speech of Pausanias which follows; and which is at once
hyperlogical in form and also extremely confused and pedantic. Plato is attacking the
logical feebleness of the sophists and rhetoricians, through their pupils, not forgetting
by the way to satirize the monotonous and unmeaning rhythms which Prodicus and
others were introducing into Attic prose (compare Protag.). Of course, he is ‘playing
both sides of the game,’ as in the Gorgias and Phaedrus; but it is not necessary in order
to understand him that we should discuss the fairness of his mode of proceeding. The
love of Pausanias for Agathon has already been touched upon in the Protagoras, and is
alluded to by Aristophanes. Hence he is naturally the upholder of male loves, which, like
all the other affections or actions of men, he regards as varying according to the manner
of their performance. Like the sophists and like Plato himself, though in a different
sense, he begins his discussion by an appeal to mythology, and distinguishes between
the elder and younger love. The value which he attributes to such loves as motives to
virtue and philosophy is at variance with modern and Christian notions, but is in
accordance with Hellenic sentiment. The opinion of Christendom has not altogether
condemned passionate friendships between persons of the same sex, but has certainly
not encouraged them, because though innocent in themselves in a few temperaments
they are liable to degenerate into fearful evil. Pausanias is very earnest in the defence of
such loves; and he speaks of them as generally approved among Hellenes and
disapproved by barbarians. His speech is ‘more words than matter,’ and might have
been composed by a pupil of Lysias or of Prodicus, although there is no hint given that
Plato is specially referring to them. As Eryximachus says, ‘he makes a fair beginning, but
a lame ending.’
Plato transposes the two next speeches, as in the Republic he would transpose the
virtues and the mathematical sciences. This is done partly to avoid monotony, partly for
the sake of making Aristophanes ‘the cause of wit in others,’ and also in order to bring
the comic and tragic poet into juxtaposition, as if by accident. A suitable ‘expectation’ of
Aristophanes is raised by the ludicrous circumstance of his having the hiccough, which is
appropriately cured by his substitute, the physician Eryximachus. To Eryximachus Love is
the good physician; he sees everything as an intelligent physicist, and, like many
professors of his art in modern times, attempts to reduce the moral to the physical; or
recognises one law of love which pervades them both. There are loves and strifes of the
body as well as of the mind. Like Hippocrates the Asclepiad, he is a disciple of
Heracleitus, whose conception of the harmony of opposites he explains in a new way as
the harmony after discord; to his common sense, as to that of many moderns as well as
ancients, the identity of contradictories is an absurdity. His notion of love may be
summed up as the harmony of man with himself in soul as well as body, and of all
things in heaven and earth with one another.
Aristophanes is ready to laugh and make laugh before he opens his mouth, just as
Socrates, true to his character, is ready to argue before he begins to speak. He expresses
the very genius of the old comedy, its coarse and forcible imagery, and the licence of its
language in speaking about the gods. He has no sophistical notions about love, which is
brought back by him to its common-sense meaning of love between intelligent beings.
His account of the origin of the sexes has the greatest (comic) probability and
verisimilitude. Nothing in Aristophanes is more truly Aristophanic than the description of
the human monster whirling round on four arms and four legs, eight in all, with
incredible rapidity. Yet there is a mixture of earnestness in this jest; three serious
principles seem to be insinuated:— first, that man cannot exist in isolation; he must be
reunited if he is to be perfected: secondly, that love is the mediator and reconciler of
poor, divided human nature: thirdly, that the loves of this world are an indistinct
anticipation of an ideal union which is not yet realized.
The speech of Agathon is conceived in a higher strain, and receives the real, if halfironical,
approval of Socrates. It is the speech of the tragic poet and a sort of poem, like
tragedy, moving among the gods of Olympus, and not among the elder or Orphic
deities. In the idea of the antiquity of love he cannot agree; love is not of the olden time,
but present and youthful ever. The speech may be compared with that speech of
Socrates in the Phaedrus in which he describes himself as talking dithyrambs. It is at
once a preparation for Socrates and a foil to him. The rhetoric of Agathon elevates the
soul to ‘sunlit heights,’ but at the same time contrasts with the natural and necessary
eloquence of Socrates. Agathon contributes the distinction between love and the works
of love, and also hints incidentally that love is always of beauty, which Socrates
afterwards raises into a principle. While the consciousness of discord is stronger in the
comic poet Aristophanes, Agathon, the tragic poet, has a deeper sense of harmony and
reconciliation, and speaks of Love as the creator and artist.
All the earlier speeches embody common opinions coloured with a tinge of philosophy.
They furnish the material out of which Socrates proceeds to form his discourse, starting,
as in other places, from mythology and the opinions of men. From Phaedrus he takes
the thought that love is stronger than death; from Pausanias, that the true love is akin to
intellect and political activity; from Eryximachus, that love is a universal phenomenon
and the great power of nature; from Aristophanes, that love is the child of want, and is
not merely the love of the congenial or of the whole, but (as he adds) of the good; from
Agathon, that love is of beauty, not however of beauty only, but of birth in beauty. As it
would be out of character for Socrates to make a lengthened harangue, the speech
takes the form of a dialogue between Socrates and a mysterious woman of foreign
extraction. She elicits the final truth from one who knows nothing, and who, speaking by
the lips of another, and himself a despiser of rhetoric, is proved also to be the most
consummate of rhetoricians (compare Menexenus).
The last of the six discourses begins with a short argument which overthrows not only
Agathon but all the preceding speakers by the help of a distinction which has escaped
them. Extravagant praises have been ascribed to Love as the author of every good; no
sort of encomium was too high for him, whether deserved and true or not. But Socrates
has no talent for speaking anything but the truth, and if he is to speak the truth of Love
he must honestly confess that he is not a good at all: for love is of the good, and no
man can desire that which he has. This piece of dialectics is ascribed to Diotima, who has
already urged upon Socrates the argument which he urges against Agathon. That the
distinction is a fallacy is obvious; it is almost acknowledged to be so by Socrates himself.
For he who has beauty or good may desire more of them; and he who has beauty or
good in himself may desire beauty and good in others. The fallacy seems to arise out of
a confusion between the abstract ideas of good and beauty, which do not admit of
degrees, and their partial realization in individuals.
But Diotima, the prophetess of Mantineia, whose sacred and superhuman character
raises her above the ordinary proprieties of women, has taught Socrates far more than
this about the art and mystery of love. She has taught him that love is another aspect of
philosophy. The same want in the human soul which is satisfied in the vulgar by the
procreation of children, may become the highest aspiration of intellectual desire. As the
Christian might speak of hungering and thirsting after righteousness; or of divine loves
under the figure of human (compare Eph. ‘This is a great mystery, but I speak
concerning Christ and the church’); as the mediaeval saint might speak of the ‘fruitio
Dei;’ as Dante saw all things contained in his love of Beatrice, so Plato would have us
absorb all other loves and desires in the love of knowledge. Here is the beginning of
Neoplatonism, or rather, perhaps, a proof (of which there are many) that the so-called
mysticism of the East was not strange to the Greek of the fifth century before Christ. The
first tumult of the affections was not wholly subdued; there were longings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
which no art could satisfy. To most men reason and passion appear to be antagonistic
both in idea and fact. The union of the greatest comprehension of knowledge and the
burning intensity of love is a contradiction in nature, which may have existed in a far-off
primeval age in the mind of some Hebrew prophet or other Eastern sage, but has now
become an imagination only. Yet this ‘passion of the reason’ is the theme of the
Symposium of Plato. And as there is no impossibility in supposing that ‘one king, or son
of a king, may be a philosopher,’ so also there is a probability that there may be some
few—perhaps one or two in a whole generation—in whom the light of truth may not
lack the warmth of desire. And if there be such natures, no one will be disposed to deny
that ‘from them flow most of the benefits of individuals and states;’ and even from
imperfect combinations of the two elements in teachers or statesmen great good may
often arise.
Yet there is a higher region in which love is not only felt, but satisfied, in the perfect
beauty of eternal knowledge, beginning with the beauty of earthly things, and at last
reaching a beauty in which all existence is seen to be harmonious and one. The limited
affection is enlarged, and enabled to behold the ideal of all things. And here the highest
summit which is reached in the Symposium is seen also to be the highest summit which
is attained in the Republic, but approached from another side; and there is ‘a way
upwards and downwards,’ which is the same and not the same in both. The ideal beauty
of the one is the ideal good of the other; regarded not with the eye of knowledge, but
of faith and desire; and they are respectively the source of beauty and the source of
good in all other things. And by the steps of a ‘ladder reaching to heaven’ we pass from
images of visible beauty (Greek), and from the hypotheses of the Mathematical sciences,
which are not yet based upon the idea of good, through the concrete to the abstract,
and, by different paths arriving, behold the vision of the eternal (compare Symp. (Greek)
Republic (Greek) also Phaedrus). Under one aspect ‘the idea is love’; under another,
‘truth.’ In both the lover of wisdom is the ‘spectator of all time and of all existence.’ This
is a ‘mystery’ in which Plato also obscurely intimates the union of the spiritual and
fleshly, the interpenetration of the moral and intellectual faculties.
The divine image of beauty which resides within Socrates has been revealed; the Silenus,
or outward man, has now to be exhibited. The description of Socrates follows
immediately after the speech of Socrates; one is the complement of the other. At the
height of divine inspiration, when the force of nature can no further go, by way of
contrast to this extreme idealism, Alcibiades, accompanied by a troop of revellers and a
flute-girl, staggers in, and being drunk is able to tell of things which he would have been
ashamed to make known if he had been sober. The state of his affections towards
Socrates, unintelligible to us and perverted as they appear, affords an illustration of the
power ascribed to the loves of man in the speech of Pausanias. He does not suppose his
feelings to be peculiar to himself: there are several other persons in the company who
have been equally in love with Socrates, and like himself have been deceived by him.
The singular part of this confession is the combination of the most degrading passion
with the desire of virtue and improvement. Such an union is not wholly untrue to human
nature, which is capable of combining good and evil in a degree beyond what we can
easily conceive. In imaginative persons, especially, the God and beast in man seem to
part asunder more than is natural in a well-regulated mind. The Platonic Socrates (for of
the real Socrates this may be doubted: compare his public rebuke of Critias for his
shameful love of Euthydemus in Xenophon, Memorabilia) does not regard the greatest
evil of Greek life as a thing not to be spoken of; but it has a ridiculous element (Plato’s
Symp.), and is a subject for irony, no less than for moral reprobation (compare Plato’s
Symp.). It is also used as a figure of speech which no one interpreted literally (compare
Xen. Symp.). Nor does Plato feel any repugnance, such as would be felt in modern times,
at bringing his great master and hero into connexion with nameless crimes. He is
contented with representing him as a saint, who has won ‘the Olympian victory’ over the
temptations of human nature. The fault of taste, which to us is so glaring and which was
recognized by the Greeks of a later age (Athenaeus), was not perceived by Plato himself.
We are still more surprised to find that the philosopher is incited to take the first step in
his upward progress (Symp.) by the beauty of young men and boys, which was alone
capable of inspiring the modern feeling of romance in the Greek mind. The passion of
love took the spurious form of an enthusiasm for the ideal of beauty—a worship as of
some godlike image of an Apollo or Antinous. But the love of youth when not depraved
was a love of virtue and modesty as well as of beauty, the one being the expression of
the other; and in certain Greek states, especially at Sparta and Thebes, the honourable
attachment of a youth to an elder man was a part of his education. The ‘army of lovers
and their beloved who would be invincible if they could be united by such a tie’ (Symp.),
is not a mere fiction of Plato’s, but seems actually to have existed at Thebes in the days
of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, if we may believe writers cited anonymously by Plutarch,
Pelop. Vit. It is observable that Plato never in the least degree excuses the depraved love
of the body (compare Charm.; Rep.; Laws; Symp.; and once more Xenophon, Mem.), nor
is there any Greek writer of mark who condones or approves such connexions. But
owing partly to the puzzling nature of the subject these friendships are spoken of by
Plato in a manner different from that customary among ourselves. To most of them we
should hesitate to ascribe, any more than to the attachment of Achilles and Patroclus in
Homer, an immoral or licentious character. There were many, doubtless, to whom the
love of the fair mind was the noblest form of friendship (Rep.), and who deemed the
friendship of man with man to be higher than the love of woman, because altogether
separated from the bodily appetites. The existence of such attachments may be
reasonably attributed to the inferiority and seclusion of woman, and the want of a real
family or social life and parental influence in Hellenic cities; and they were encouraged
by the practice of gymnastic exercises, by the meetings of political clubs, and by the tie
of military companionship. They were also an educational institution: a young person
was specially entrusted by his parents to some elder friend who was expected by them
to train their son in manly exercises and in virtue. It is not likely that a Greek parent
committed him to a lover, any more than we should to a schoolmaster, in the
expectation that he would be corrupted by him, but rather in the hope that his morals
would be better cared for than was possible in a great household of slaves.
It is difficult to adduce the authority of Plato either for or against such practices or
customs, because it is not always easy to determine whether he is speaking of ‘the
heavenly and philosophical love, or of the coarse Polyhymnia:’ and he often refers to this
(e.g. in the Symposium) half in jest, yet ‘with a certain degree of seriousness.’ We
observe that they entered into one part of Greek literature, but not into another, and
that the larger part is free from such associations. Indecency was an element of the
ludicrous in the old Greek Comedy, as it has been in other ages and countries. But
effeminate love was always condemned as well as ridiculed by the Comic poets; and in
the New Comedy the allusions to such topics have disappeared. They seem to have
been no longer tolerated by the greater refinement of the age. False sentiment is found
in the Lyric and Elegiac poets; and in mythology ‘the greatest of the Gods’ (Rep.) is not
exempt from evil imputations. But the morals of a nation are not to be judged of wholly
by its literature. Hellas was not necessarily more corrupted in the days of the Persian and
Peloponnesian wars, or of Plato and the Orators, than England in the time of Fielding
and Smollett, or France in the nineteenth century. No one supposes certain French
novels to be a representation of ordinary French life. And the greater part of Greek
literature, beginning with Homer and including the tragedians, philosophers, and, with
the exception of the Comic poets (whose business was to raise a laugh by whatever
means), all the greater writers of Hellas who have been preserved to us, are free from
the taint of indecency.
Some general considerations occur to our mind when we begin to reflect on this
subject. (1) That good and evil are linked together in human nature, and have often
existed side by side in the world and in man to an extent hardly credible. We cannot
distinguish them, and are therefore unable to part them; as in the parable ‘they grow
together unto the harvest:’ it is only a rule of external decency by which society can
divide them. Nor should we be right in inferring from the prevalence of any one vice or
corruption that a state or individual was demoralized in their whole character. Not only
has the corruption of the best been sometimes thought to be the worst, but it may be
remarked that this very excess of evil has been the stimulus to good (compare Plato,
Laws, where he says that in the most corrupt cities individuals are to be found beyond
all praise). (2) It may be observed that evils which admit of degrees can seldom be
rightly estimated, because under the same name actions of the most different degrees
of culpability may be included. No charge is more easily set going than the imputation
of secret wickedness (which cannot be either proved or disproved and often cannot be
defined) when directed against a person of whom the world, or a section of it, is
predisposed to think evil. And it is quite possible that the malignity of Greek scandal,
aroused by some personal jealousy or party enmity, may have converted the innocent
friendship of a great man for a noble youth into a connexion of another kind. Such
accusations were brought against several of the leading men of Hellas, e.g. Cimon,
Alcibiades, Critias, Demosthenes, Epaminondas: several of the Roman emperors were
assailed by similar weapons which have been used even in our own day against
statesmen of the highest character. (3) While we know that in this matter there is a great
gulf fixed between Greek and Christian Ethics, yet, if we would do justice to the Greeks,
we must also acknowledge that there was a greater outspokenness among them than
among ourselves about the things which nature hides, and that the more frequent
mention of such topics is not to be taken as the measure of the prevalence of offences,
or as a proof of the general corruption of society. It is likely that every religion in the
world has used words or practised rites in one age, which have become distasteful or
repugnant to another. We cannot, though for different reasons, trust the representations
either of Comedy or Satire; and still less of Christian Apologists. (4) We observe that at
Thebes and Lacedemon the attachment of an elder friend to a beloved youth was often
deemed to be a part of his education; and was encouraged by his parents—it was only
shameful if it degenerated into licentiousness. Such we may believe to have been the tie
which united Asophychus and Cephisodorus with the great Epaminondas in whose
companionship they fell (Plutarch, Amat.; Athenaeus on the authority of Theopompus).
(5) A small matter: there appears to be a difference of custom among the Greeks and
among ourselves, as between ourselves and continental nations at the present time, in
modes of salutation. We must not suspect evil in the hearty kiss or embrace of a male
friend ‘returning from the army at Potidaea’ any more than in a similar salutation when
practised by members of the same family. But those who make these admissions, and
who regard, not without pity, the victims of such illusions in our own day, whose life has
been blasted by them, may be none the less resolved that the natural and healthy
instincts of mankind shall alone be tolerated (Greek); and that the lesson of manliness
which we have inherited from our fathers shall not degenerate into sentimentalism or
effeminacy. The possibility of an honourable connexion of this kind seems to have died
out with Greek civilization. Among the Romans, and also among barbarians, such as the
Celts and Persians, there is no trace of such attachments existing in any noble or
virtuous form.
(Compare Hoeck’s Creta and the admirable and exhaustive article of Meier in Ersch and
Grueber’s Cyclopedia on this subject; Plutarch, Amatores; Athenaeus; Lysias contra
Simonem; Aesch. c. Timarchum.)
The character of Alcibiades in the Symposium is hardly less remarkable than that of
Socrates, and agrees with the picture given of him in the first of the two Dialogues
which are called by his name, and also with the slight sketch of him in the Protagoras.
He is the impersonation of lawlessness— ‘the lion’s whelp, who ought not to be reared
in the city,’ yet not without a certain generosity which gained the hearts of men,—
strangely fascinated by Socrates, and possessed of a genius which might have been
either the destruction or salvation of Athens. The dramatic interest of the character is
heightened by the recollection of his after history. He seems to have been present to the
mind of Plato in the description of the democratic man of the Republic (compare also
Alcibiades 1).
There is no criterion of the date of the Symposium, except that which is furnished by the
allusion to the division of Arcadia after the destruction of Mantinea. This took place in
the year B.C. 384, which is the forty- fourth year of Plato’s life. The Symposium cannot
therefore be regarded as a youthful work. As Mantinea was restored in the year 369, the
composition of the Dialogue will probably fall between 384 and 369. Whether the
recollection of the event is more likely to have been renewed at the destruction or
restoration of the city, rather than at some intermediate period, is a consideration not
worth raising.
The Symposium is connected with the Phaedrus both in style and subject; they are the
only Dialogues of Plato in which the theme of love is discussed at length. In both of
them philosophy is regarded as a sort of enthusiasm or madness; Socrates is himself ‘a
prophet new inspired’ with Bacchanalian revelry, which, like his philosophy, he
characteristically pretends to have derived not from himself but from others. The
Phaedo also presents some points of comparison with the Symposium. For there, too,
philosophy might be described as ‘dying for love;’ and there are not wanting many
touches of humour and fancy, which remind us of the Symposium. But while the Phaedo
and Phaedrus look backwards and forwards to past and future states of existence, in the
Symposium there is no break between this world and another; and we rise from one to
the other by a regular series of steps or stages, proceeding from the particulars of sense
to the universal of reason, and from one universal to many, which are finally reunited in
a single science (compare Rep.). At first immortality means only the succession of
existences; even knowledge comes and goes. Then follows, in the language of the
mysteries, a higher and a higher degree of initiation; at last we arrive at the perfect
vision of beauty, not relative or changing, but eternal and absolute; not bounded by this
world, or in or out of this world, but an aspect of the divine, extending over all things,
and having no limit of space or time: this is the highest knowledge of which the human
mind is capable. Plato does not go on to ask whether the individual is absorbed in the
sea of light and beauty or retains his personality. Enough for him to have attained the
true beauty or good, without enquiring precisely into the relation in which human
beings stood to it. That the soul has such a reach of thought, and is capable of partaking
of the eternal nature, seems to imply that she too is eternal (compare Phaedrus). But
Plato does not distinguish the eternal in man from the eternal in the world or in God. He
is willing to rest in the contemplation of the idea, which to him is the cause of all things
(Rep.), and has no strength to go further.
The Symposium of Xenophon, in which Socrates describes himself as a pander, and also
discourses of the difference between sensual and sentimental love, likewise offers
several interesting points of comparison. But the suspicion which hangs over other
writings of Xenophon, and the numerous minute references to the Phaedrus and
Symposium, as well as to some of the other writings of Plato, throw a doubt on the
genuineness of the work. The Symposium of Xenophon, if written by him at all, would
certainly show that he wrote against Plato, and was acquainted with his works. Of this
hostility there is no trace in the Memorabilia. Such a rivalry is more characteristic of an
imitator than of an original writer. The (so-called) Symposium of Xenophon may
therefore have no more title to be regarded as genuine than the confessedly spurious
Apology.
There are no means of determining the relative order in time of the Phaedrus,
Symposium, Phaedo. The order which has been adopted in this translation rests on no
other principle than the desire to bring together in a series the memorials of the life of
Socrates.
SYMPOSIUM
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Apollodorus, who repeats to his companion the dialogue
which he had heard from Aristodemus, and had already once narrated to Glaucon.
Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, Alcibiades, A Troop
of Revellers.
SCENE: The House of Agathon.
Concerning the things about which you ask to be informed I believe that I am not illprepared
with an answer. For the day before yesterday I was coming from my own
home at Phalerum to the city, and one of my acquaintance, who had caught a sight of
me from behind, calling out playfully in the distance, said: Apollodorus, O thou Phalerian
(Probably a play of words on (Greek), ‘bald-headed.’) man, halt! So I did as I was bid; and
then he said, I was looking for you, Apollodorus, only just now, that I might ask you
about the speeches in praise of love, which were delivered by Socrates, Alcibiades, and
others, at Agathon’s supper. Phoenix, the son of Philip, told another person who told me
of them; his narrative was very indistinct, but he said that you knew, and I wish that you
would give me an account of them. Who, if not you, should be the reporter of the words
of your friend? And first tell me, he said, were you present at this meeting?
Your informant, Glaucon, I said, must have been very indistinct indeed, if you imagine
that the occasion was recent; or that I could have been of the party.
Why, yes, he replied, I thought so.
Impossible: I said. Are you ignorant that for many years Agathon has not resided at
Athens; and not three have elapsed since I became acquainted with Socrates, and have
made it my daily business to know all that he says and does. There was a time when I
was running about the world, fancying myself to be well employed, but I was really a
most wretched being, no better than you are now. I thought that I ought to do anything
rather than be a philosopher.
Well, he said, jesting apart, tell me when the meeting occurred.
In our boyhood, I replied, when Agathon won the prize with his first tragedy, on the day
after that on which he and his chorus offered the sacrifice of victory.
Then it must have been a long while ago, he said; and who told you—did Socrates?
No indeed, I replied, but the same person who told Phoenix;—he was a little fellow, who
never wore any shoes, Aristodemus, of the deme of Cydathenaeum. He had been at
Agathon’s feast; and I think that in those days there was no one who was a more
devoted admirer of Socrates. Moreover, I have asked Socrates about the truth of some
parts of his narrative, and he confirmed them. Then, said Glaucon, let us have the tale
over again; is not the road to Athens just made for conversation? And so we walked, and
talked of the discourses on love; and therefore, as I said at first, I am not ill-prepared to
comply with your request, and will have another rehearsal of them if you like. For to
speak or to hear others speak of philosophy always gives me the greatest pleasure, to
say nothing of the profit. But when I hear another strain, especially that of you rich men
and traders, such conversation displeases me; and I pity you who are my companions,
because you think that you are doing something when in reality you are doing nothing.
And I dare say that you pity me in return, whom you regard as an unhappy creature, and
very probably you are right. But I certainly know of you what you only think of me—
there is the difference.
COMPANION: I see, Apollodorus, that you are just the same—always speaking evil of
yourself, and of others; and I do believe that you pity all mankind, with the exception of
Socrates, yourself first of all, true in this to your old name, which, however deserved, I
know not how you acquired, of Apollodorus the madman; for you are always raging
against yourself and everybody but Socrates.
APOLLODORUS: Yes, friend, and the reason why I am said to be mad, and out of my
wits, is just because I have these notions of myself and you; no other evidence is
required.
COMPANION: No more of that, Apollodorus; but let me renew my request that you
would repeat the conversation.
APOLLODORUS: Well, the tale of love was on this wise:—But perhaps I had better begin
at the beginning, and endeavour to give you the exact words of Aristodemus:
He said that he met Socrates fresh from the bath and sandalled; and as the sight of the
sandals was unusual, he asked him whither he was going that he had been converted
into such a beau:—
To a banquet at Agathon’s, he replied, whose invitation to his sacrifice of victory I
refused yesterday, fearing a crowd, but promising that I would come to-day instead; and
so I have put on my finery, because he is such a fine man. What say you to going with
me unasked?
I will do as you bid me, I replied.
Follow then, he said, and let us demolish the proverb:—
‘To the feasts of inferior men the good unbidden go;’
instead of which our proverb will run:—
‘To the feasts of the good the good unbidden go;’
and this alteration may be supported by the authority of Homer himself, who not only
demolishes but literally outrages the proverb. For, after picturing Agamemnon as the
most valiant of men, he makes Menelaus, who is but a fainthearted warrior, come
unbidden (Iliad) to the banquet of Agamemnon, who is feasting and offering sacrifices,
not the better to the worse, but the worse to the better.
I rather fear, Socrates, said Aristodemus, lest this may still be my case; and that, like
Menelaus in Homer, I shall be the inferior person, who
‘To the feasts of the wise unbidden goes.’
But I shall say that I was bidden of you, and then you will have to make an excuse.
‘Two going together,’
he replied, in Homeric fashion, one or other of them may invent an excuse by the way
(Iliad).
This was the style of their conversation as they went along. Socrates dropped behind in
a fit of abstraction, and desired Aristodemus, who was waiting, to go on before him.
When he reached the house of Agathon he found the doors wide open, and a comical
thing happened. A servant coming out met him, and led him at once into the
banqueting-hall in which the guests were reclining, for the banquet was about to begin.
Welcome, Aristodemus, said Agathon, as soon as he appeared—you are just in time to
sup with us; if you come on any other matter put it off, and make one of us, as I was
looking for you yesterday and meant to have asked you, if I could have found you. But
what have you done with Socrates?
I turned round, but Socrates was nowhere to be seen; and I had to explain that he had
been with me a moment before, and that I came by his invitation to the supper.
You were quite right in coming, said Agathon; but where is he himself?
He was behind me just now, as I entered, he said, and I cannot think what has become
of him.
Go and look for him, boy, said Agathon, and bring him in; and do you, Aristodemus,
meanwhile take the place by Eryximachus.
The servant then assisted him to wash, and he lay down, and presently another servant
came in and reported that our friend Socrates had retired into the portico of the
neighbouring house. ‘There he is fixed,’ said he, ‘and when I call to him he will not stir.’
How strange, said Agathon; then you must call him again, and keep calling him.
Let him alone, said my informant; he has a way of stopping anywhere and losing himself
without any reason. I believe that he will soon appear; do not therefore disturb him.
Well, if you think so, I will leave him, said Agathon. And then, turning to the servants, he
added, ‘Let us have supper without waiting for him. Serve up whatever you please, for
there is no one to give you orders; hitherto I have never left you to yourselves. But on
this occasion imagine that you are our hosts, and that I and the company are your
guests; treat us well, and then we shall commend you.’ After this, supper was served, but
still no Socrates; and during the meal Agathon several times expressed a wish to send
for him, but Aristodemus objected; and at last when the feast was about half over—for
the fit, as usual, was not of long duration —Socrates entered. Agathon, who was
reclining alone at the end of the table, begged that he would take the place next to him;
that ‘I may touch you,’ he said, ‘and have the benefit of that wise thought which came
into your mind in the portico, and is now in your possession; for I am certain that you
would not have come away until you had found what you sought.’
How I wish, said Socrates, taking his place as he was desired, that wisdom could be
infused by touch, out of the fuller into the emptier man, as water runs through wool out
of a fuller cup into an emptier one; if that were so, how greatly should I value the
privilege of reclining at your side! For you would have filled me full with a stream of
wisdom plenteous and fair; whereas my own is of a very mean and questionable sort, no
better than a dream. But yours is bright and full of promise, and was manifested forth in
all the splendour of youth the day before yesterday, in the presence of more than thirty
thousand Hellenes.
You are mocking, Socrates, said Agathon, and ere long you and I will have to determine
who bears off the palm of wisdom—of this Dionysus shall be the judge; but at present
you are better occupied with supper.
Socrates took his place on the couch, and supped with the rest; and then libations were
offered, and after a hymn had been sung to the god, and there had been the usual
ceremonies, they were about to commence drinking, when Pausanias said, And now, my
friends, how can we drink with least injury to ourselves? I can assure you that I feel
severely the effect of yesterday’s potations, and must have time to recover; and I
suspect that most of you are in the same predicament, for you were of the party
yesterday. Consider then: How can the drinking be made easiest?
I entirely agree, said Aristophanes, that we should, by all means, avoid hard drinking, for
I was myself one of those who were yesterday drowned in drink.
I think that you are right, said Eryximachus, the son of Acumenus; but I should still like to
hear one other person speak: Is Agathon able to drink hard?
I am not equal to it, said Agathon.
Then, said Eryximachus, the weak heads like myself, Aristodemus, Phaedrus, and others
who never can drink, are fortunate in finding that the stronger ones are not in a drinking
mood. (I do not include Socrates, who is able either to drink or to abstain, and will not
mind, whichever we do.) Well, as of none of the company seem disposed to drink much,
I may be forgiven for saying, as a physician, that drinking deep is a bad practice, which I
never follow, if I can help, and certainly do not recommend to another, least of all to any
one who still feels the effects of yesterday’s carouse.
I always do what you advise, and especially what you prescribe as a physician, rejoined
Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian, and the rest of the company, if they are wise, will do the
same.
It was agreed that drinking was not to be the order of the day, but that they were all to
drink only so much as they pleased.
Then, said Eryximachus, as you are all agreed that drinking is to be voluntary, and that
there is to be no compulsion, I move, in the next place, that the flute-girl, who has just
made her appearance, be told to go away and play to herself, or, if she likes, to the
women who are within (compare Prot.). To-day let us have conversation instead; and, if
you will allow me, I will tell you what sort of conversation. This proposal having been
accepted, Eryximachus proceeded as follows:—
I will begin, he said, after the manner of Melanippe in Euripides,
‘Not mine the word’
which I am about to speak, but that of Phaedrus. For often he says to me in an indignant
tone:—‘What a strange thing it is, Eryximachus, that, whereas other gods have poems
and hymns made in their honour, the great and glorious god, Love, has no encomiast
among all the poets who are so many. There are the worthy sophists too—the excellent
Prodicus for example, who have descanted in prose on the virtues of Heracles and other
heroes; and, what is still more extraordinary, I have met with a philosophical work in
which the utility of salt has been made the theme of an eloquent discourse; and many
other like things have had a like honour bestowed upon them. And only to think that
there should have been an eager interest created about them, and yet that to this day
no one has ever dared worthily to hymn Love’s praises! So entirely has this great deity
been neglected.’ Now in this Phaedrus seems to me to be quite right, and therefore I
want to offer him a contribution; also I think that at the present moment we who are
here assembled cannot do better than honour the god Love. If you agree with me, there
will be no lack of conversation; for I mean to propose that each of us in turn, going from
left to right, shall make a speech in honour of Love. Let him give us the best which he
can; and Phaedrus, because he is sitting first on the left hand, and because he is the
father of the thought, shall begin.
No one will vote against you, Eryximachus, said Socrates. How can I oppose your
motion, who profess to understand nothing but matters of love; nor, I presume, will
Agathon and Pausanias; and there can be no doubt of Aristophanes, whose whole
concern is with Dionysus and Aphrodite; nor will any one disagree of those whom I see
around me. The proposal, as I am aware, may seem rather hard upon us whose place is
last; but we shall be contented if we hear some good speeches first. Let Phaedrus begin
the praise of Love, and good luck to him. All the company expressed their assent, and
desired him to do as Socrates bade him.
Aristodemus did not recollect all that was said, nor do I recollect all that he related to
me; but I will tell you what I thought most worthy of remembrance, and what the chief
speakers said.
Phaedrus began by affirming that Love is a mighty god, and wonderful among gods and
men, but especially wonderful in his birth. For he is the eldest of the gods, which is an
honour to him; and a proof of his claim to this honour is, that of his parents there is no
memorial; neither poet nor prose-writer has ever affirmed that he had any. As Hesiod
says:—
‘First Chaos came, and then broad-bosomed Earth, The everlasting seat of all that is,
And Love.’
In other words, after Chaos, the Earth and Love, these two, came into being. Also
Parmenides sings of Generation:
‘First in the train of gods, he fashioned Love.’
And Acusilaus agrees with Hesiod. Thus numerous are the witnesses who acknowledge
Love to be the eldest of the gods. And not only is he the eldest, he is also the source of
the greatest benefits to us. For I know not any greater blessing to a young man who is
beginning life than a virtuous lover, or to the lover than a beloved youth. For the
principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live—that principle, I
say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so
well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honour and dishonour, without
which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work. And I say that a
lover who is detected in doing any dishonourable act, or submitting through cowardice
when any dishonour is done to him by another, will be more pained at being detected
by his beloved than at being seen by his father, or by his companions, or by any one
else. The beloved too, when he is found in any disgraceful situation, has the same
feeling about his lover. And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an
army should be made up of lovers and their loves (compare Rep.), they would be the
very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one
another in honour; and when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful,
they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by
all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his
arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who
would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would
become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him.
That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the souls of some heroes,
Love of his own nature infuses into the lover.
Love will make men dare to die for their beloved—love alone; and women as well as
men. Of this, Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, is a monument to all Hellas; for she was
willing to lay down her life on behalf of her husband, when no one else would, although
he had a father and mother; but the tenderness of her love so far exceeded theirs, that
she made them seem to be strangers in blood to their own son, and in name only
related to him; and so noble did this action of hers appear to the gods, as well as to
men, that among the many who have done virtuously she is one of the very few to
whom, in admiration of her noble action, they have granted the privilege of returning
alive to earth; such exceeding honour is paid by the gods to the devotion and virtue of
love. But Orpheus, the son of Oeagrus, the harper, they sent empty away, and presented
to him an apparition only of her whom he sought, but herself they would not give up,
because he showed no spirit; he was only a harp-player, and did not dare like Alcestis to
die for love, but was contriving how he might enter Hades alive; moreover, they
afterwards caused him to suffer death at the hands of women, as the punishment of his
cowardliness. Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover
Patroclus—his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a
foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two,
fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless,
and younger far). And greatly as the gods honour the virtue of love, still the return of
love on the part of the beloved to the lover is more admired and valued and rewarded
by them, for the lover is more divine; because he is inspired by God. Now Achilles was
quite aware, for he had been told by his mother, that he might avoid death and return
home, and live to a good old age, if he abstained from slaying Hector. Nevertheless he
gave his life to revenge his friend, and dared to die, not only in his defence, but after he
was dead. Wherefore the gods honoured him even above Alcestis, and sent him to the
Islands of the Blest. These are my reasons for affirming that Love is the eldest and
noblest and mightiest of the gods; and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life, and
of happiness after death.
This, or something like this, was the speech of Phaedrus; and some other speeches
followed which Aristodemus did not remember; the next which he repeated was that of
Pausanias. Phaedrus, he said, the argument has not been set before us, I think, quite in
the right form;—we should not be called upon to praise Love in such an indiscriminate
manner. If there were only one Love, then what you said would be well enough; but
since there are more Loves than one,—should have begun by determining which of
them was to be the theme of our praises. I will amend this defect; and first of all I will tell
you which Love is deserving of praise, and then try to hymn the praiseworthy one in a
manner worthy of him. For we all know that Love is inseparable from Aphrodite, and if
there were only one Aphrodite there would be only one Love; but as there are two
goddesses there must be two Loves. And am I not right in asserting that there are two
goddesses? The elder one, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite—
she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione —
her we call common; and the Love who is her fellow-worker is rightly named common,
as the other love is called heavenly. All the gods ought to have praise given to them, but
not without distinction of their natures; and therefore I must try to distinguish the
characters of the two Loves. Now actions vary according to the manner of their
performance. Take, for example, that which we are now doing, drinking, singing and
talking—these actions are not in themselves either good or evil, but they turn out in this
or that way according to the mode of performing them; and when well done they are
good, and when wrongly done they are evil; and in like manner not every love, but only
that which has a noble purpose, is noble and worthy of praise. The Love who is the
offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination,
being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of
youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul—the most foolish beings are the
objects of this love which desires only to gain an end, but never thinks of accomplishing
the end nobly, and therefore does good and evil quite indiscriminately. The goddess
who is his mother is far younger than the other, and she was born of the union of the
male and female, and partakes of both. But the offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is
derived from a mother in whose birth the female has no part,—she is from the male
only; this is that love which is of youths, and the goddess being older, there is nothing
of wantonness in her. Those who are inspired by this love turn to the male, and delight
in him who is the more valiant and intelligent nature; any one may recognise the pure
enthusiasts in the very character of their attachments. For they love not boys, but
intelligent beings whose reason is beginning to be developed, much about the time at
which their beards begin to grow. And in choosing young men to be their companions,
they mean to be faithful to them, and pass their whole life in company with them, not to
take them in their inexperience, and deceive them, and play the fool with them, or run
away from one to another of them. But the love of young boys should be forbidden by
law, because their future is uncertain; they may turn out good or bad, either in body or
soul, and much noble enthusiasm may be thrown away upon them; in this matter the
good are a law to themselves, and the coarser sort of lovers ought to be restrained by
force; as we restrain or attempt to restrain them from fixing their affections on women
of free birth. These are the persons who bring a reproach on love; and some have been
led to deny the lawfulness of such attachments because they see the impropriety and
evil of them; for surely nothing that is decorously and lawfully done can justly be
censured. Now here and in Lacedaemon the rules about love are perplexing, but in most
cities they are simple and easily intelligible; in Elis and Boeotia, and in countries having
no gifts of eloquence, they are very straightforward; the law is simply in favour of these
connexions, and no one, whether young or old, has anything to say to their discredit;
the reason being, as I suppose, that they are men of few words in those parts, and
therefore the lovers do not like the trouble of pleading their suit. In Ionia and other
places, and generally in countries which are subject to the barbarians, the custom is held
to be dishonourable; loves of youths share the evil repute in which philosophy and
gymnastics are held, because they are inimical to tyranny; for the interests of rulers
require that their subjects should be poor in spirit (compare Arist. Politics), and that
there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, which love, above
all other motives, is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants learned by experience; for
the love of Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had a strength which undid
their power. And, therefore, the ill-repute into which these attachments have fallen is to
be ascribed to the evil condition of those who make them to be ill-reputed; that is to
say, to the self- seeking of the governors and the cowardice of the governed; on the
other hand, the indiscriminate honour which is given to them in some countries is
attributable to the laziness of those who hold this opinion of them. In our own country a
far better principle prevails, but, as I was saying, the explanation of it is rather
perplexing. For, observe that open loves are held to be more honourable than secret
ones, and that the love of the noblest and highest, even if their persons are less
beautiful than others, is especially honourable. Consider, too, how great is the
encouragement which all the world gives to the lover; neither is he supposed to be
doing anything dishonourable; but if he succeeds he is praised, and if he fail he is
blamed. And in the pursuit of his love the custom of mankind allows him to do many
strange things, which philosophy would bitterly censure if they were done from any
motive of interest, or wish for office or power. He may pray, and entreat, and supplicate,
and swear, and lie on a mat at the door, and endure a slavery worse than that of any
slave—in any other case friends and enemies would be equally ready to prevent him,
but now there is no friend who will be ashamed of him and admonish him, and no
enemy will charge him with meanness or flattery; the actions of a lover have a grace
which ennobles them; and custom has decided that they are highly commendable and
that there no loss of character in them; and, what is strangest of all, he only may swear
and forswear himself (so men say), and the gods will forgive his transgression, for there
is no such thing as a lover’s oath. Such is the entire liberty which gods and men have
allowed the lover, according to the custom which prevails in our part of the world. From
this point of view a man fairly argues that in Athens to love and to be loved is held to be
a very honourable thing. But when parents forbid their sons to talk with their lovers, and
place them under a tutor’s care, who is appointed to see to these things, and their
companions and equals cast in their teeth anything of the sort which they may observe,
and their elders refuse to silence the reprovers and do not rebuke them—any one who
reflects on all this will, on the contrary, think that we hold these practices to be most
disgraceful. But, as I was saying at first, the truth as I imagine is, that whether such
practices are honourable or whether they are dishonourable is not a simple question;
they are honourable to him who follows them honourably, dishonourable to him who
follows them dishonourably. There is dishonour in yielding to the evil, or in an evil
manner; but there is honour in yielding to the good, or in an honourable manner. Evil is
the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even
stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the
bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of
all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it
becomes one with the everlasting. The custom of our country would have both of them
proven well and truly, and would have us yield to the one sort of lover and avoid the
other, and therefore encourages some to pursue, and others to fly; testing both the
lover and beloved in contests and trials, until they show to which of the two classes they
respectively belong. And this is the reason why, in the first place, a hasty attachment is
held to be dishonourable, because time is the true test of this as of most other things;
and secondly there is a dishonour in being overcome by the love of money, or of wealth,
or of political power, whether a man is frightened into surrender by the loss of them, or,
having experienced the benefits of money and political corruption, is unable to rise
above the seductions of them. For none of these things are of a permanent or lasting
nature; not to mention that no generous friendship ever sprang from them. There
remains, then, only one way of honourable attachment which custom allows in the
beloved, and this is the way of virtue; for as we admitted that any service which the lover
does to him is not to be accounted flattery or a dishonour to himself, so the beloved has
one way only of voluntary service which is not dishonourable, and this is virtuous
service.
For we have a custom, and according to our custom any one who does service to
another under the idea that he will be improved by him either in wisdom, or in some
other particular of virtue—such a voluntary service, I say, is not to be regarded as a
dishonour, and is not open to the charge of flattery. And these two customs, one the
love of youth, and the other the practice of philosophy and virtue in general, ought to
meet in one, and then the beloved may honourably indulge the lover. For when the
lover and beloved come together, having each of them a law, and the lover thinks that
he is right in doing any service which he can to his gracious loving one; and the other
that he is right in showing any kindness which he can to him who is making him wise
and good; the one capable of communicating wisdom and virtue, the other seeking to
acquire them with a view to education and wisdom, when the two laws of love are
fulfilled and meet in one—then, and then only, may the beloved yield with honour to
the lover. Nor when love is of this disinterested sort is there any disgrace in being
deceived, but in every other case there is equal disgrace in being or not being deceived.
For he who is gracious to his lover under the impression that he is rich, and is
disappointed of his gains because he turns out to be poor, is disgraced all the same: for
he has done his best to show that he would give himself up to any one’s ‘uses base’ for
the sake of money; but this is not honourable. And on the same principle he who gives
himself to a lover because he is a good man, and in the hope that he will be improved
by his company, shows himself to be virtuous, even though the object of his affection
turn out to be a villain, and to have no virtue; and if he is deceived he has committed a
noble error. For he has proved that for his part he will do anything for anybody with a
view to virtue and improvement, than which there can be nothing nobler. Thus noble in
every case is the acceptance of another for the sake of virtue. This is that love which is
the love of the heavenly godess, and is heavenly, and of great price to individuals and
cities, making the lover and the beloved alike eager in the work of their own
improvement. But all other loves are the offspring of the other, who is the common
goddess. To you, Phaedrus, I offer this my contribution in praise of love, which is as
good as I could make extempore.
Pausanias came to a pause—this is the balanced way in which I have been taught by the
wise to speak; and Aristodemus said that the turn of Aristophanes was next, but either
he had eaten too much, or from some other cause he had the hiccough, and was
obliged to change turns with Eryximachus the physician, who was reclining on the couch
below him. Eryximachus, he said, you ought either to stop my hiccough, or to speak in
my turn until I have left off.
I will do both, said Eryximachus: I will speak in your turn, and do you speak in mine; and
while I am speaking let me recommend you to hold your breath, and if after you have
done so for some time the hiccough is no better, then gargle with a little water; and if it
still continues, tickle your nose with something and sneeze; and if you sneeze once or
twice, even the most violent hiccough is sure to go. I will do as you prescribe, said
Aristophanes, and now get on.
Eryximachus spoke as follows: Seeing that Pausanias made a fair beginning, and but a
lame ending, I must endeavour to supply his deficiency. I think that he has rightly
distinguished two kinds of love. But my art further informs me that the double love is
not merely an affection of the soul of man towards the fair, or towards anything, but is
to be found in the bodies of all animals and in productions of the earth, and I may say in
all that is; such is the conclusion which I seem to have gathered from my own art of
medicine, whence I learn how great and wonderful and universal is the deity of love,
whose empire extends over all things, divine as well as human. And from medicine I will
begin that I may do honour to my art. There are in the human body these two kinds of
love, which are confessedly different and unlike, and being unlike, they have loves and
desires which are unlike; and the desire of the healthy is one, and the desire of the
diseased is another; and as Pausanias was just now saying that to indulge good men is
honourable, and bad men dishonourable:—so too in the body the good and healthy
elements are to be indulged, and the bad elements and the elements of disease are not
to be indulged, but discouraged. And this is what the physician has to do, and in this the
art of medicine consists: for medicine may be regarded generally as the knowledge of
the loves and desires of the body, and how to satisfy them or not; and the best
physician is he who is able to separate fair love from foul, or to convert one into the
other; and he who knows how to eradicate and how to implant love, whichever is
required, and can reconcile the most hostile elements in the constitution and make
them loving friends, is a skilful practitioner. Now the most hostile are the most opposite,
such as hot and cold, bitter and sweet, moist and dry, and the like. And my ancestor,
Asclepius, knowing how to implant friendship and accord in these elements, was the
creator of our art, as our friends the poets here tell us, and I believe them; and not only
medicine in every branch but the arts of gymnastic and husbandry are under his
dominion. Any one who pays the least attention to the subject will also perceive that in
music there is the same reconciliation of opposites; and I suppose that this must have
been the meaning of Heracleitus, although his words are not accurate; for he says that
The One is united by disunion, like the harmony of the bow and the lyre. Now there is
an absurdity saying that harmony is discord or is composed of elements which are still
in a state of discord. But what he probably meant was, that harmony is composed of
differing notes of higher or lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by
the art of music; for if the higher and lower notes still disagreed, there could be no
harmony,—clearly not. For harmony is a symphony, and symphony is an agreement; but
an agreement of disagreements while they disagree there cannot be; you cannot
harmonize that which disagrees. In like manner rhythm is compounded of elements
short and long, once differing and now in accord; which accordance, as in the former
instance, medicine, so in all these other cases, music implants, making love and unison
to grow up among them; and thus music, too, is concerned with the principles of love in
their application to harmony and rhythm. Again, in the essential nature of harmony and
rhythm there is no difficulty in discerning love which has not yet become double. But
when you want to use them in actual life, either in the composition of songs or in the
correct performance of airs or metres composed already, which latter is called
education, then the difficulty begins, and the good artist is needed. Then the old tale
has to be repeated of fair and heavenly love—the love of Urania the fair and heavenly
muse, and of the duty of accepting the temperate, and those who are as yet
intemperate only that they may become temperate, and of preserving their love; and
again, of the vulgar Polyhymnia, who must be used with circumspection that the
pleasure be enjoyed, but may not generate licentiousness; just as in my own art it is a
great matter so to regulate the desires of the epicure that he may gratify his tastes
without the attendant evil of disease. Whence I infer that in music, in medicine, in all
other things human as well as divine, both loves ought to be noted as far as may be, for
they are both present.
The course of the seasons is also full of both these principles; and when, as I was saying,
the elements of hot and cold, moist and dry, attain the harmonious love of one another
and blend in temperance and harmony, they bring to men, animals, and plants health
and plenty, and do them no harm; whereas the wanton love, getting the upper hand
and affecting the seasons of the year, is very destructive and injurious, being the source
of pestilence, and bringing many other kinds of diseases on animals and plants; for
hoar-frost and hail and blight spring from the excesses and disorders of these elements
of love, which to know in relation to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies and the
seasons of the year is termed astronomy. Furthermore all sacrifices and the whole
province of divination, which is the art of communion between gods and men—these, I
say, are concerned only with the preservation of the good and the cure of the evil love.
For all manner of impiety is likely to ensue if, instead of accepting and honouring and
reverencing the harmonious love in all his actions, a man honours the other love,
whether in his feelings towards gods or parents, towards the living or the dead.
Wherefore the business of divination is to see to these loves and to heal them, and
divination is the peacemaker of gods and men, working by a knowledge of the religious
or irreligious tendencies which exist in human loves. Such is the great and mighty, or
rather omnipotent force of love in general. And the love, more especially, which is
concerned with the good, and which is perfected in company with temperance and
justice, whether among gods or men, has the greatest power, and is the source of all our
happiness and harmony, and makes us friends with the gods who are above us, and with
one another. I dare say that I too have omitted several things which might be said in
praise of Love, but this was not intentional, and you, Aristophanes, may now supply the
omission or take some other line of commendation; for I perceive that you are rid of the
hiccough.
Yes, said Aristophanes, who followed, the hiccough is gone; not, however, until I applied
the sneezing; and I wonder whether the harmony of the body has a love of such noises
and ticklings, for I no sooner applied the sneezing than I was cured.
Eryximachus said: Beware, friend Aristophanes, although you are going to speak, you are
making fun of me; and I shall have to watch and see whether I cannot have a laugh at
your expense, when you might speak in peace.
You are right, said Aristophanes, laughing. I will unsay my words; but do you please not
to watch me, as I fear that in the speech which I am about to make, instead of others
laughing with me, which is to the manner born of our muse and would be all the better,
I shall only be laughed at by them.
Do you expect to shoot your bolt and escape, Aristophanes? Well, perhaps if you are
very careful and bear in mind that you will be called to account, I may be induced to let
you off.
Aristophanes professed to open another vein of discourse; he had a mind to praise Love
in another way, unlike that either of Pausanias or Eryximachus. Mankind, he said, judging
by their neglect of him, have never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love. For if
they had understood him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and
offered solemn sacrifices in his honour; but this is not done, and most certainly ought to
be done: since of all the gods he is the best friend of men, the helper and the healer of
the ills which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race. I will try to describe
his power to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you. In
the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the
original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as
they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of
the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real
existence, but is now lost, and the word ‘Androgynous’ is only preserved as a term of
reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming
a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite
ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the
remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards
as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four
hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the
air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have
described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally
the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is
made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round like
their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts
were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and
Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon
the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate
the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of
the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods
could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of
reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: ‘Methinks I have a plan which will humble
their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in
two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will
have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on
two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and
they shall hop about on a single leg.’ He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple
which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut
them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in
order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a
lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their
forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that
which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made
one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the
navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a
shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the
belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of
man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one
another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the
point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything
apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought
another mate, man or woman as we call them,—being the sections of entire men or
women,—and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them
invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had
not been always their position, and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like
grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male
generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they
might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be
satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of
one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two,
and healing the state of man. Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat
fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who
are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of
women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after
men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female
attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the
male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they
hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and
youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are
shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but
because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace
that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these
only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood
they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,—if at
all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed
to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to
return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets
with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of
another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and
one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the
people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire
of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does
not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul
of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and
doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair
who are lying side by side and to say to them, ‘What do you people want of one
another?’ they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their
perplexity he said: ‘Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one
another’s company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let
you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a
common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be
one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and
whether you are satisfied to attain this?’—there is not a man of them who when he
heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and
melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of
his ancient need (compare Arist. Pol.). And the reason is that human nature was
originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called
love. There was a time, I say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness of
mankind God has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by the
Lacedaemonians (compare Arist. Pol.). And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a
danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like the profile
figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall
be like tallies. Wherefore let us exhort all men to piety, that we may avoid evil, and
obtain the good, of which Love is to us the lord and minister; and let no one oppose
him—he is the enemy of the gods who opposes him. For if we are friends of the God
and at peace with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this
world at present. I am serious, and therefore I must beg Eryximachus not to make fun or
to find any allusion in what I am saying to Pausanias and Agathon, who, as I suspect, are
both of the manly nature, and belong to the class which I have been describing. But my
words have a wider application —they include men and women everywhere; and I
believe that if our loves were perfectly accomplished, and each one returning to his
primeval nature had his original true love, then our race would be happy. And if this
would be best of all, the best in the next degree and under present circumstances must
be the nearest approach to such an union; and that will be the attainment of a congenial
love. Wherefore, if we would praise him who has given to us the benefit, we must praise
the god Love, who is our greatest benefactor, both leading us in this life back to our
own nature, and giving us high hopes for the future, for he promises that if we are
pious, he will restore us to our original state, and heal us and make us happy and
blessed. This, Eryximachus, is my discourse of love, which, although different to yours, I
must beg you to leave unassailed by the shafts of your ridicule, in order that each may
have his turn; each, or rather either, for Agathon and Socrates are the only ones left.
Indeed, I am not going to attack you, said Eryximachus, for I thought your speech
charming, and did I not know that Agathon and Socrates are masters in the art of love, I
should be really afraid that they would have nothing to say, after the world of things
which have been said already. But, for all that, I am not without hopes.
Socrates said: You played your part well, Eryximachus; but if you were as I am now, or
rather as I shall be when Agathon has spoken, you would, indeed, be in a great strait.
You want to cast a spell over me, Socrates, said Agathon, in the hope that I may be
disconcerted at the expectation raised among the audience that I shall speak well.
I should be strangely forgetful, Agathon replied Socrates, of the courage and
magnanimity which you showed when your own compositions were about to be
exhibited, and you came upon the stage with the actors and faced the vast theatre
altogether undismayed, if I thought that your nerves could be fluttered at a small party
of friends.
Do you think, Socrates, said Agathon, that my head is so full of the theatre as not to
know how much more formidable to a man of sense a few good judges are than many
fools?
Nay, replied Socrates, I should be very wrong in attributing to you, Agathon, that or any
other want of refinement. And I am quite aware that if you happened to meet with any
whom you thought wise, you would care for their opinion much more than for that of
the many. But then we, having been a part of the foolish many in the theatre, cannot be
regarded as the select wise; though I know that if you chanced to be in the presence,
not of one of ourselves, but of some really wise man, you would be ashamed of
disgracing yourself before him—would you not?
Yes, said Agathon.
But before the many you would not be ashamed, if you thought that you were doing
something disgraceful in their presence?
Here Phaedrus interrupted them, saying: not answer him, my dear Agathon; for if he can
only get a partner with whom he can talk, especially a good- looking one, he will no
longer care about the completion of our plan. Now I love to hear him talk; but just at
present I must not forget the encomium on Love which I ought to receive from him and
from every one. When you and he have paid your tribute to the god, then you may talk.
Very good, Phaedrus, said Agathon; I see no reason why I should not proceed with my
speech, as I shall have many other opportunities of conversing with Socrates. Let me say
first how I ought to speak, and then speak:—
The previous speakers, instead of praising the god Love, or unfolding his nature, appear
to have congratulated mankind on the benefits which he confers upon them. But I
would rather praise the god first, and then speak of his gifts; this is always the right way
of praising everything. May I say without impiety or offence, that of all the blessed gods
he is the most blessed because he is the fairest and best? And he is the fairest: for, in the
first place, he is the youngest, and of his youth he is himself the witness, fleeing out of
the way of age, who is swift enough, swifter truly than most of us like:—Love hates him
and will not come near him; but youth and love live and move together—like to like, as
the proverb says. Many things were said by Phaedrus about Love in which I agree with
him; but I cannot agree that he is older than Iapetus and Kronos:—not so; I maintain him
to be the youngest of the gods, and youthful ever. The ancient doings among the gods
of which Hesiod and Parmenides spoke, if the tradition of them be true, were done of
Necessity and not of Love; had Love been in those days, there would have been no
chaining or mutilation of the gods, or other violence, but peace and sweetness, as there
is now in heaven, since the rule of Love began. Love is young and also tender; he ought
to have a poet like Homer to describe his tenderness, as Homer says of Ate, that she is a
goddess and tender:—
‘Her feet are tender, for she sets her steps, Not on the ground but on the heads of men:’
herein is an excellent proof of her tenderness,—that she walks not upon the hard but
upon the soft. Let us adduce a similar proof of the tenderness of Love; for he walks not
upon the earth, nor yet upon the skulls of men, which are not so very soft, but in the
hearts and souls of both gods and men, which are of all things the softest: in them he
walks and dwells and makes his home. Not in every soul without exception, for where
there is hardness he departs, where there is softness there he dwells; and nestling
always with his feet and in all manner of ways in the softest of soft places, how can he
be other than the softest of all things? Of a truth he is the tenderest as well as the
youngest, and also he is of flexile form; for if he were hard and without flexure he could
not enfold all things, or wind his way into and out of every soul of man undiscovered.
And a proof of his flexibility and symmetry of form is his grace, which is universally
admitted to be in an especial manner the attribute of Love; ungrace and love are always
at war with one another. The fairness of his complexion is revealed by his habitation
among the flowers; for he dwells not amid bloomless or fading beauties, whether of
body or soul or aught else, but in the place of flowers and scents, there he sits and
abides. Concerning the beauty of the god I have said enough; and yet there remains
much more which I might say. Of his virtue I have now to speak: his greatest glory is that
he can neither do nor suffer wrong to or from any god or any man; for he suffers not by
force if he suffers; force comes not near him, neither when he acts does he act by force.
For all men in all things serve him of their own free will, and where there is voluntary
agreement, there, as the laws which are the lords of the city say, is justice. And not only
is he just but exceedingly temperate, for Temperance is the acknowledged ruler of the
pleasures and desires, and no pleasure ever masters Love; he is their master and they
are his servants; and if he conquers them he must be temperate indeed. As to courage,
even the God of War is no match for him; he is the captive and Love is the lord, for love,
the love of Aphrodite, masters him, as the tale runs; and the master is stronger than the
servant. And if he conquers the bravest of all others, he must be himself the bravest. Of
his courage and justice and temperance I have spoken, but I have yet to speak of his
wisdom; and according to the measure of my ability I must try to do my best. In the first
place he is a poet (and here, like Eryximachus, I magnify my art), and he is also the
source of poesy in others, which he could not be if he were not himself a poet. And at
the touch of him every one becomes a poet, even though he had no music in him
before (A fragment of the Sthenoaoea of Euripides.); this also is a proof that Love is a
good poet and accomplished in all the fine arts; for no one can give to another that
which he has not himself, or teach that of which he has no knowledge. Who will deny
that the creation of the animals is his doing? Are they not all the works of his wisdom,
born and begotten of him? And as to the artists, do we not know that he only of them
whom love inspires has the light of fame?—he whom Love touches not walks in
darkness. The arts of medicine and archery and divination were discovered by Apollo,
under the guidance of love and desire; so that he too is a disciple of Love. Also the
melody of the Muses, the metallurgy of Hephaestus, the weaving of Athene, the empire
of Zeus over gods and men, are all due to Love, who was the inventor of them. And so
Love set in order the empire of the gods—the love of beauty, as is evident, for with
deformity Love has no concern. In the days of old, as I began by saying, dreadful deeds
were done among the gods, for they were ruled by Necessity; but now since the birth of
Love, and from the Love of the beautiful, has sprung every good in heaven and earth.
Therefore, Phaedrus, I say of Love that he is the fairest and best in himself, and the
cause of what is fairest and best in all other things. And there comes into my mind a line
of poetry in which he is said to be the god who
‘Gives peace on earth and calms the stormy deep, Who stills the winds and bids the
sufferer sleep.’
This is he who empties men of disaffection and fills them with affection, who makes
them to meet together at banquets such as these: in sacrifices, feasts, dances, he is our
lord—who sends courtesy and sends away discourtesy, who gives kindness ever and
never gives unkindness; the friend of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement
of the gods; desired by those who have no part in him, and precious to those who have
the better part in him; parent of delicacy, luxury, desire, fondness, softness, grace;
regardful of the good, regardless of the evil: in every word, work, wish, fear—saviour,
pilot, comrade, helper; glory of gods and men, leader best and brightest: in whose
footsteps let every man follow, sweetly singing in his honour and joining in that sweet
strain with which love charms the souls of gods and men. Such is the speech, Phaedrus,
half-playful, yet having a certain measure of seriousness, which, according to my ability, I
dedicate to the god.
When Agathon had done speaking, Aristodemus said that there was a general cheer; the
young man was thought to have spoken in a manner worthy of himself, and of the god.
And Socrates, looking at Eryximachus, said: Tell me, son of Acumenus, was there not
reason in my fears? and was I not a true prophet when I said that Agathon would make
a wonderful oration, and that I should be in a strait?
The part of the prophecy which concerns Agathon, replied Eryximachus, appears to me
to be true; but not the other part—that you will be in a strait.
Why, my dear friend, said Socrates, must not I or any one be in a strait who has to speak
after he has heard such a rich and varied discourse? I am especially struck with the
beauty of the concluding words—who could listen to them without amazement? When I
reflected on the immeasurable inferiority of my own powers, I was ready to run away for
shame, if there had been a possibility of escape. For I was reminded of Gorgias, and at
the end of his speech I fancied that Agathon was shaking at me the Gorginian or
Gorgonian head of the great master of rhetoric, which was simply to turn me and my
speech into stone, as Homer says (Odyssey), and strike me dumb. And then I perceived
how foolish I had been in consenting to take my turn with you in praising love, and
saying that I too was a master of the art, when I really had no conception how anything
ought to be praised. For in my simplicity I imagined that the topics of praise should be
true, and that this being presupposed, out of the true the speaker was to choose the
best and set them forth in the best manner. And I felt quite proud, thinking that I knew
the nature of true praise, and should speak well. Whereas I now see that the intention
was to attribute to Love every species of greatness and glory, whether really belonging
to him or not, without regard to truth or falsehood—that was no matter; for the original
proposal seems to have been not that each of you should really praise Love, but only
that you should appear to praise him. And so you attribute to Love every imaginable
form of praise which can be gathered anywhere; and you say that ‘he is all this,’ and ‘the
cause of all that,’ making him appear the fairest and best of all to those who know him
not, for you cannot impose upon those who know him. And a noble and solemn hymn
of praise have you rehearsed. But as I misunderstood the nature of the praise when I
said that I would take my turn, I must beg to be absolved from the promise which I
made in ignorance, and which (as Euripides would say (Eurip. Hyppolytus)) was a
promise of the lips and not of the mind. Farewell then to such a strain: for I do not
praise in that way; no, indeed, I cannot. But if you like to hear the truth about love, I am
ready to speak in my own manner, though I will not make myself ridiculous by entering
into any rivalry with you. Say then, Phaedrus, whether you would like to have the truth
about love, spoken in any words and in any order which may happen to come into my
mind at the time. Will that be agreeable to you?
Aristodemus said that Phaedrus and the company bid him speak in any manner which
he thought best. Then, he added, let me have your permission first to ask Agathon a few
more questions, in order that I may take his admissions as the premisses of my
discourse.
I grant the permission, said Phaedrus: put your questions. Socrates then proceeded as
follows:—
In the magnificent oration which you have just uttered, I think that you were right, my
dear Agathon, in proposing to speak of the nature of Love first and afterwards of his
works—that is a way of beginning which I very much approve. And as you have spoken
so eloquently of his nature, may I ask you further, Whether love is the love of something
or of nothing? And here I must explain myself: I do not want you to say that love is the
love of a father or the love of a mother—that would be ridiculous; but to answer as you
would, if I asked is a father a father of something? to which you would find no difficulty
in replying, of a son or daughter: and the answer would be right.
Very true, said Agathon.
And you would say the same of a mother?
He assented.
Yet let me ask you one more question in order to illustrate my meaning: Is not a brother
to be regarded essentially as a brother of something?
Certainly, he replied.
That is, of a brother or sister?
Yes, he said.
And now, said Socrates, I will ask about Love:—Is Love of something or of nothing?
Of something, surely, he replied.
Keep in mind what this is, and tell me what I want to know—whether Love desires that
of which love is.
Yes, surely.
And does he possess, or does he not possess, that which he loves and desires?
Probably not, I should say.
Nay, replied Socrates, I would have you consider whether ‘necessarily’ is not rather the
word. The inference that he who desires something is in want of something, and that he
who desires nothing is in want of nothing, is in my judgment, Agathon, absolutely and
necessarily true. What do you think?
I agree with you, said Agathon.
Very good. Would he who is great, desire to be great, or he who is strong, desire to be
strong?
That would be inconsistent with our previous admissions.
True. For he who is anything cannot want to be that which he is?
Very true.
And yet, added Socrates, if a man being strong desired to be strong, or being swift
desired to be swift, or being healthy desired to be healthy, in that case he might be
thought to desire something which he already has or is. I give the example in order that
we may avoid misconception. For the possessors of these qualities, Agathon, must be
supposed to have their respective advantages at the time, whether they choose or not;
and who can desire that which he has? Therefore, when a person says, I am well and
wish to be well, or I am rich and wish to be rich, and I desire simply to have what I
have—to him we shall reply: ‘You, my friend, having wealth and health and strength,
want to have the continuance of them; for at this moment, whether you choose or no,
you have them. And when you say, I desire that which I have and nothing else, is not
your meaning that you want to have what you now have in the future?’ He must agree
with us—must he not?
He must, replied Agathon.
Then, said Socrates, he desires that what he has at present may be preserved to him in
the future, which is equivalent to saying that he desires something which is non-existent
to him, and which as yet he has not got:
Very true, he said.
Then he and every one who desires, desires that which he has not already, and which is
future and not present, and which he has not, and is not, and of which he is in want;—
these are the sort of things which love and desire seek?
Very true, he said.
Then now, said Socrates, let us recapitulate the argument. First, is not love of something,
and of something too which is wanting to a man?
Yes, he replied.
Remember further what you said in your speech, or if you do not remember I will
remind you: you said that the love of the beautiful set in order the empire of the gods,
for that of deformed things there is no love—did you not say something of that kind?
Yes, said Agathon.
Yes, my friend, and the remark was a just one. And if this is true, Love is the love of
beauty and not of deformity?
He assented.
And the admission has been already made that Love is of something which a man wants
and has not?
True, he said.
Then Love wants and has not beauty?
Certainly, he replied.
And would you call that beautiful which wants and does not possess beauty?
Certainly not.
Then would you still say that love is beautiful?
Agathon replied: I fear that I did not understand what I was saying.
You made a very good speech, Agathon, replied Socrates; but there is yet one small
question which I would fain ask:—Is not the good also the beautiful?
Yes.
Then in wanting the beautiful, love wants also the good?
I cannot refute you, Socrates, said Agathon:—Let us assume that what you say is true.
Say rather, beloved Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth; for Socrates is easily
refuted.
And now, taking my leave of you, I would rehearse a tale of love which I heard from
Diotima of Mantineia (compare 1 Alcibiades), a woman wise in this and in many other
kinds of knowledge, who in the days of old, when the Athenians offered sacrifice before
the coming of the plague, delayed the disease ten years. She was my instructress in the
art of love, and I shall repeat to you what she said to me, beginning with the admissions
made by Agathon, which are nearly if not quite the same which I made to the wise
woman when she questioned me: I think that this will be the easiest way, and I shall take
both parts myself as well as I can (compare Gorgias). As you, Agathon, suggested
(supra), I must speak first of the being and nature of Love, and then of his works. First I
said to her in nearly the same words which he used to me, that Love was a mighty god,
and likewise fair; and she proved to me as I proved to him that, by my own showing,
Love was neither fair nor good. ‘What do you mean, Diotima,’ I said, ‘is love then evil
and foul?’ ‘Hush,’ she cried; ‘must that be foul which is not fair?’ ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘And is
that which is not wise, ignorant? do you not see that there is a mean between wisdom
and ignorance?’ ‘And what may that be?’ I said. ‘Right opinion,’ she replied; ‘which, as
you know, being incapable of giving a reason, is not knowledge (for how can knowledge
be devoid of reason? nor again, ignorance, for neither can ignorance attain the truth),
but is clearly something which is a mean between ignorance and wisdom.’ ‘Quite true,’ I
replied. ‘Do not then insist,’ she said, ‘that what is not fair is of necessity foul, or what is
not good evil; or infer that because love is not fair and good he is therefore foul and
evil; for he is in a mean between them.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Love is surely admitted by all to be
a great god.’ ‘By those who know or by those who do not know?’ ‘By all.’ ‘And how,
Socrates,’ she said with a smile, ‘can Love be acknowledged to be a great god by those
who say that he is not a god at all?’ ‘And who are they?’ I said. ‘You and I are two of
them,’ she replied. ‘How can that be?’ I said. ‘It is quite intelligible,’ she replied; ‘for you
yourself would acknowledge that the gods are happy and fair—of course you would—
would you dare to say that any god was not?’ ‘Certainly not,’ I replied. ‘And you mean by
the happy, those who are the possessors of things good or fair?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you
admitted that Love, because he was in want, desires those good and fair things of which
he is in want?’ ‘Yes, I did.’ ‘But how can he be a god who has no portion in what is either
good or fair?’ ‘Impossible.’ ‘Then you see that you also deny the divinity of Love.’
‘What then is Love?’ I asked; ‘Is he mortal?’ ‘No.’ ‘What then?’ ‘As in the former instance,
he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the two.’ ‘What is he,
Diotima?’ ‘He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the
divine and the mortal.’ ‘And what,’ I said, ‘is his power?’ ‘He interprets,’ she replied,
‘between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and
sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator
who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together,
and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries
and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find their way. For God mingles not with
man; but through Love all the intercourse and converse of God with man, whether
awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other
wisdom, such as that of arts and handicrafts, is mean and vulgar. Now these spirits or
intermediate powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love.’ ‘And who,’ I said,
‘was his father, and who his mother?’ ‘The tale,’ she said, ‘will take time; nevertheless I
will tell you. On the birthday of Aphrodite there was a feast of the gods, at which the
god Poros or Plenty, who is the son of Metis or Discretion, was one of the guests. When
the feast was over, Penia or Poverty, as the manner is on such occasions, came about
the doors to beg. Now Plenty who was the worse for nectar (there was no wine in those
days), went into the garden of Zeus and fell into a heavy sleep, and Poverty considering
her own straitened circumstances, plotted to have a child by him, and accordingly she
lay down at his side and conceived Love, who partly because he is naturally a lover of
the beautiful, and because Aphrodite is herself beautiful, and also because he was born
on her birthday, is her follower and attendant. And as his parentage is, so also are his
fortunes. In the first place he is always poor, and anything but tender and fair, as the
many imagine him; and he is rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell
in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven, in the streets, or at the
doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is always in distress. Like his
father too, whom he also partly resembles, he is always plotting against the fair and
good; he is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or
other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times,
terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal,
but alive and flourishing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead at another
moment, and again alive by reason of his father’s nature. But that which is always
flowing in is always flowing out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth; and,
further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge. The truth of the matter is
this: No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, for he is wise already; nor does any
man who is wise seek after wisdom. Neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. For
herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless
satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want.’ ‘But who
then, Diotima,’ I said, ‘are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the
foolish?’ ‘A child may answer that question,’ she replied; ‘they are those who are in a
mean between the two; Love is one of them. For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and
Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and
being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. And of this too
his birth is the cause; for his father is wealthy and wise, and his mother poor and foolish.
Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the spirit Love. The error in your conception of
him was very natural, and as I imagine from what you say, has arisen out of a confusion
of love and the beloved, which made you think that love was all beautiful. For the
beloved is the truly beautiful, and delicate, and perfect, and blessed; but the principle of
love is of another nature, and is such as I have described.’
I said, ‘O thou stranger woman, thou sayest well; but, assuming Love to be such as you
say, what is the use of him to men?’ ‘That, Socrates,’ she replied, ‘I will attempt to unfold:
of his nature and birth I have already spoken; and you acknowledge that love is of the
beautiful. But some one will say: Of the beautiful in what, Socrates and Diotima?—or
rather let me put the question more clearly, and ask: When a man loves the beautiful,
what does he desire?’ I answered her ‘That the beautiful may be his.’ ‘Still,’ she said, ‘the
answer suggests a further question: What is given by the possession of beauty?’ ‘To
what you have asked,’ I replied, ‘I have no answer ready.’ ‘Then,’ she said, ‘let me put the
word “good” in the place of the beautiful, and repeat the question once more: If he who
loves loves the good, what is it then that he loves?’ ‘The possession of the good,’ I said.
‘And what does he gain who possesses the good?’ ‘Happiness,’ I replied; ‘there is less
difficulty in answering that question.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the happy are made happy by the
acquisition of good things. Nor is there any need to ask why a man desires happiness;
the answer is already final.’ ‘You are right.’ I said. ‘And is this wish and this desire
common to all? and do all men always desire their own good, or only some men?—what
say you?’ ‘All men,’ I replied; ‘the desire is common to all.’ ‘Why, then,’ she rejoined, ‘are
not all men, Socrates, said to love, but only some of them? whereas you say that all men
are always loving the same things.’ ‘I myself wonder,’ I said, ‘why this is.’ ‘There is
nothing to wonder at,’ she replied; ‘the reason is that one part of love is separated off
and receives the name of the whole, but the other parts have other names.’ ‘Give an
illustration,’ I said. She answered me as follows: ‘There is poetry, which, as you know, is
complex and manifold. All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or
making, and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are all poets or
makers.’ ‘Very true.’ ‘Still,’ she said, ‘you know that they are not called poets, but have
other names; only that portion of the art which is separated off from the rest, and is
concerned with music and metre, is termed poetry, and they who possess poetry in this
sense of the word are called poets.’ ‘Very true,’ I said. ‘And the same holds of love. For
you may say generally that all desire of good and happiness is only the great and subtle
power of love; but they who are drawn towards him by any other path, whether the path
of money-making or gymnastics or philosophy, are not called lovers—the name of the
whole is appropriated to those whose affection takes one form only—they alone are
said to love, or to be lovers.’ ‘I dare say,’ I replied, ‘that you are right.’ ‘Yes,’ she added,
‘and you hear people say that lovers are seeking for their other half; but I say that they
are seeking neither for the half of themselves, nor for the whole, unless the half or the
whole be also a good. And they will cut off their own hands and feet and cast them
away, if they are evil; for they love not what is their own, unless perchance there be
some one who calls what belongs to him the good, and what belongs to another the
evil. For there is nothing which men love but the good. Is there anything?’ ‘Certainly, I
should say, that there is nothing.’ ‘Then,’ she said, ‘the simple truth is, that men love the
good.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘To which must be added that they love the possession of the good?’
‘Yes, that must be added.’ ‘And not only the possession, but the everlasting possession
of the good?’ ‘That must be added too.’ ‘Then love,’ she said, ‘may be described
generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good?’ ‘That is most true.’
‘Then if this be the nature of love, can you tell me further,’ she said, ‘what is the manner
of the pursuit? what are they doing who show all this eagerness and heat which is called
love? and what is the object which they have in view? Answer me.’ ‘Nay, Diotima,’ I
replied, ‘if I had known, I should not have wondered at your wisdom, neither should I
have come to learn from you about this very matter.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I will teach you:—
The object which they have in view is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul.’ ‘I do not
understand you,’ I said; ‘the oracle requires an explanation.’ ‘I will make my meaning
clearer,’ she replied. ‘I mean to say, that all men are bringing to the birth in their bodies
and in their souls. There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of
procreation—procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and this
procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for conception and
generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious
they can never be. But the deformed is always inharmonious with the divine, and the
beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of parturition who
presides at birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is
propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness
she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and
not without a pang refrains from conception. And this is the reason why, when the hour
of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy
about beauty whose approach is the alleviation of the pain of travail. For love, Socrates,
is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only.’ ‘What then?’ ‘The love of
generation and of birth in beauty.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, indeed,’ she replied. ‘But why of
generation?’ ‘Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and
immortality,’ she replied; ‘and if, as has been already admitted, love is of the everlasting
possession of the good, all men will necessarily desire immortality together with good:
Wherefore love is of immortality.’
All this she taught me at various times when she spoke of love. And I remember her
once saying to me, ‘What is the cause, Socrates, of love, and the attendant desire? See
you not how all animals, birds, as well as beasts, in their desire of procreation, are in
agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union;
whereto is added the care of offspring, on whose behalf the weakest are ready to battle
against the strongest even to the uttermost, and to die for them, and will let themselves
be tormented with hunger or suffer anything in order to maintain their young. Man may
be supposed to act thus from reason; but why should animals have these passionate
feelings? Can you tell me why?’ Again I replied that I did not know. She said to me: ‘And
do you expect ever to become a master in the art of love, if you do not know this?’ ‘But I
have told you already, Diotima, that my ignorance is the reason why I come to you; for I
am conscious that I want a teacher; tell me then the cause of this and of the other
mysteries of love.’ ‘Marvel not,’ she said, ‘if you believe that love is of the immortal, as
we have several times acknowledged; for here again, and on the same principle too, the
mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is
only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new
existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the same individual there is
succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval
which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and
identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation—hair, flesh, bones,
blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but
also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never
remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of
knowledge, and what is still more surprising to us mortals, not only do the sciences in
general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; but each
of them individually experiences a like change. For what is implied in the word
“recollection,” but the departure of knowledge, which is ever being forgotten, and is
renewed and preserved by recollection, and appears to be the same although in reality
new, according to that law of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not
absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another
new and similar existence behind—unlike the divine, which is always the same and not
another? And in this way, Socrates, the mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of
immortality; but the immortal in another way. Marvel not then at the love which all men
have of their offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality.’
I was astonished at her words, and said: ‘Is this really true, O thou wise Diotima?’ And
she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: ‘Of that, Socrates, you
may be assured;—think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the
senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an
immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run
for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for
the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal. Do you imagine that
Alcestis would have died to save Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own
Codrus in order to preserve the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the
memory of their virtues, which still survives among us, would be immortal? Nay,’ she
said, ‘I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the more they
do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal.
‘Those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to women and beget
children—this is the character of their love; their offspring, as they hope, will preserve
their memory and giving them the blessedness and immortality which they desire in the
future. But souls which are pregnant —for there certainly are men who are more creative
in their souls than in their bodies—conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive
or contain. And what are these conceptions?—wisdom and virtue in general. And such
creators are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor. But the
greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of
states and families, and which is called temperance and justice. And he who in youth has
the seed of these implanted in him and is himself inspired, when he comes to maturity
desires to beget and generate. He wanders about seeking beauty that he may beget
offspring—for in deformity he will beget nothing—and naturally embraces the beautiful
rather than the deformed body; above all when he finds a fair and noble and wellnurtured
soul, he embraces the two in one person, and to such an one he is full of
speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of a good man; and he tries to educate
him; and at the touch of the beautiful which is ever present to his memory, even when
absent, he brings forth that which he had conceived long before, and in company with
him tends that which he brings forth; and they are married by a far nearer tie and have a
closer friendship than those who beget mortal children, for the children who are their
common offspring are fairer and more immortal. Who, when he thinks of Homer and
Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human
ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which
have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory? Or who would not have
such children as Lycurgus left behind him to be the saviours, not only of Lacedaemon,
but of Hellas, as one may say? There is Solon, too, who is the revered father of Athenian
laws; and many others there are in many other places, both among Hellenes and
barbarians, who have given to the world many noble works, and have been the parents
of virtue of every kind; and many temples have been raised in their honour for the sake
of children such as theirs; which were never raised in honour of any one, for the sake of
his mortal children.
‘These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates, may enter; to the
greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of these, and to which, if you pursue
them in a right spirit, they will lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain. But I
will do my utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can. For he who would
proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if
he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only—out of that he should
create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is
akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how
foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is and the same! And
when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise
and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage
he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the
outward form. So that if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to
love and tend him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may
improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of
institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and
that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the
sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of
one youth or man or institution, himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing
towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble
thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and
waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the
science of beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed; please to give me your very best
attention:
‘He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see
the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly
perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our
former toils)—a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying,
or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at
one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another time or in another relation or
at another place foul, as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or
hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or
existing in any other being, as for example, in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in
any other place; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without
diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and
perishing beauties of all other things. He who from these ascending under the influence
of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order
of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of
earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only,
and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair
practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the
notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my
dear Socrates,’ said the stranger of Mantineia, ‘is that life above all others which man
should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld,
you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and
youths, whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be content
to live seeing them only and conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were
possible—you only want to look at them and to be with them. But what if man had eyes
to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not
clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life—
thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine?
Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he
will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of
an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the
friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?’
Such, Phaedrus—and I speak not only to you, but to all of you—were the words of
Diotima; and I am persuaded of their truth. And being persuaded of them, I try to
persuade others, that in the attainment of this end human nature will not easily find a
helper better than love: And therefore, also, I say that every man ought to honour him
as I myself honour him, and walk in his ways, and exhort others to do the same, and
praise the power and spirit of love according to the measure of my ability now and ever.
The words which I have spoken, you, Phaedrus, may call an encomium of love, or
anything else which you please.
When Socrates had done speaking, the company applauded, and Aristophanes was
beginning to say something in answer to the allusion which Socrates had made to his
own speech, when suddenly there was a great knocking at the door of the house, as of
revellers, and the sound of a flute-girl was heard. Agathon told the attendants to go and
see who were the intruders. ‘If they are friends of ours,’ he said, ‘invite them in, but if
not, say that the drinking is over.’ A little while afterwards they heard the voice of
Alcibiades resounding in the court; he was in a great state of intoxication, and kept
roaring and shouting ‘Where is Agathon? Lead me to Agathon,’ and at length,
supported by the flute-girl and some of his attendants, he found his way to them. ‘Hail,
friends,’ he said, appearing at the door crowned with a massive garland of ivy and
violets, his head flowing with ribands. ‘Will you have a very drunken man as a
companion of your revels? Or shall I crown Agathon, which was my intention in coming,
and go away? For I was unable to come yesterday, and therefore I am here to-day,
carrying on my head these ribands, that taking them from my own head, I may crown
the head of this fairest and wisest of men, as I may be allowed to call him. Will you
laugh at me because I am drunk? Yet I know very well that I am speaking the truth,
although you may laugh. But first tell me; if I come in shall we have the understanding of
which I spoke (supra Will you have a very drunken man? etc.)? Will you drink with me or
not?’
The company were vociferous in begging that he would take his place among them, and
Agathon specially invited him. Thereupon he was led in by the people who were with
him; and as he was being led, intending to crown Agathon, he took the ribands from his
own head and held them in front of his eyes; he was thus prevented from seeing
Socrates, who made way for him, and Alcibiades took the vacant place between
Agathon and Socrates, and in taking the place he embraced Agathon and crowned him.
Take off his sandals, said Agathon, and let him make a third on the same couch.
By all means; but who makes the third partner in our revels? said Alcibiades, turning
round and starting up as he caught sight of Socrates. By Heracles, he said, what is this?
here is Socrates always lying in wait for me, and always, as his way is, coming out at all
sorts of unsuspected places: and now, what have you to say for yourself, and why are
you lying here, where I perceive that you have contrived to find a place, not by a joker or
lover of jokes, like Aristophanes, but by the fairest of the company?
Socrates turned to Agathon and said: I must ask you to protect me, Agathon; for the
passion of this man has grown quite a serious matter to me. Since I became his admirer
I have never been allowed to speak to any other fair one, or so much as to look at them.
If I do, he goes wild with envy and jealousy, and not only abuses me but can hardly keep
his hands off me, and at this moment he may do me some harm. Please to see to this,
and either reconcile me to him, or, if he attempts violence, protect me, as I am in bodily
fear of his mad and passionate attempts.
There can never be reconciliation between you and me, said Alcibiades; but for the
present I will defer your chastisement. And I must beg you, Agathon, to give me back
some of the ribands that I may crown the marvellous head of this universal despot—I
would not have him complain of me for crowning you, and neglecting him, who in
conversation is the conqueror of all mankind; and this not only once, as you were the
day before yesterday, but always. Whereupon, taking some of the ribands, he crowned
Socrates, and again reclined.
Then he said: You seem, my friends, to be sober, which is a thing not to be endured; you
must drink—for that was the agreement under which I was admitted—and I elect myself
master of the feast until you are well drunk. Let us have a large goblet, Agathon, or
rather, he said, addressing the attendant, bring me that wine-cooler. The wine-cooler
which had caught his eye was a vessel holding more than two quarts—this he filled and
emptied, and bade the attendant fill it again for Socrates. Observe, my friends, said
Alcibiades, that this ingenious trick of mine will have no effect on Socrates, for he can
drink any quantity of wine and not be at all nearer being drunk. Socrates drank the cup
which the attendant filled for him.
Eryximachus said: What is this, Alcibiades? Are we to have neither conversation nor
singing over our cups; but simply to drink as if we were thirsty?
Alcibiades replied: Hail, worthy son of a most wise and worthy sire!
The same to you, said Eryximachus; but what shall we do?
That I leave to you, said Alcibiades.
‘The wise physician skilled our wounds to heal (from Pope’s Homer, Il.)’
shall prescribe and we will obey. What do you want?
Well, said Eryximachus, before you appeared we had passed a resolution that each one
of us in turn should make a speech in praise of love, and as good a one as he could: the
turn was passed round from left to right; and as all of us have spoken, and you have not
spoken but have well drunken, you ought to speak, and then impose upon Socrates any
task which you please, and he on his right hand neighbour, and so on.
That is good, Eryximachus, said Alcibiades; and yet the comparison of a drunken man’s
speech with those of sober men is hardly fair; and I should like to know, sweet friend,
whether you really believe what Socrates was just now saying; for I can assure you that
the very reverse is the fact, and that if I praise any one but himself in his presence,
whether God or man, he will hardly keep his hands off me.
For shame, said Socrates.
Hold your tongue, said Alcibiades, for by Poseidon, there is no one else whom I will
praise when you are of the company.
Well then, said Eryximachus, if you like praise Socrates.
What do you think, Eryximachus? said Alcibiades: shall I attack him and inflict the
punishment before you all?
What are you about? said Socrates; are you going to raise a laugh at my expense? Is that
the meaning of your praise?
I am going to speak the truth, if you will permit me.
I not only permit, but exhort you to speak the truth.
Then I will begin at once, said Alcibiades, and if I say anything which is not true, you may
interrupt me if you will, and say ‘that is a lie,’ though my intention is to speak the truth.
But you must not wonder if I speak any how as things come into my mind; for the fluent
and orderly enumeration of all your singularities is not a task which is easy to a man in
my condition.
And now, my boys, I shall praise Socrates in a figure which will appear to him to be a
caricature, and yet I speak, not to make fun of him, but only for the truth’s sake. I say,
that he is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries’ shops,
holding pipes and flutes in their mouths; and they are made to open in the middle, and
have images of gods inside them. I say also that he is like Marsyas the satyr. You
yourself will not deny, Socrates, that your face is like that of a satyr. Aye, and there is a
resemblance in other points too. For example, you are a bully, as I can prove by
witnesses, if you will not confess. And are you not a flute-player? That you are, and a
performer far more wonderful than Marsyas. He indeed with instruments used to charm
the souls of men by the power of his breath, and the players of his music do so still: for
the melodies of Olympus (compare Arist. Pol.) are derived from Marsyas who taught
them, and these, whether they are played by a great master or by a miserable flute-girl,
have a power which no others have; they alone possess the soul and reveal the wants of
those who have need of gods and mysteries, because they are divine. But you produce
the same effect with your words only, and do not require the flute: that is the difference
between you and him. When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, he
produces absolutely no effect upon us, or not much, whereas the mere fragments of you
and your words, even at second-hand, and however imperfectly repeated, amaze and
possess the souls of every man, woman, and child who comes within hearing of them.
And if I were not afraid that you would think me hopelessly drunk, I would have sworn
as well as spoken to the influence which they have always had and still have over me.
For my heart leaps within me more than that of any Corybantian reveller, and my eyes
rain tears when I hear them. And I observe that many others are affected in the same
manner. I have heard Pericles and other great orators, and I thought that they spoke
well, but I never had any similar feeling; my soul was not stirred by them, nor was I angry
at the thought of my own slavish state. But this Marsyas has often brought me to such a
pass, that I have felt as if I could hardly endure the life which I am leading (this, Socrates,
you will admit); and I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him, and fly as
from the voice of the siren, my fate would be like that of others,—he would transfix me,
and I should grow old sitting at his feet. For he makes me confess that I ought not to
live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and busying myself with the concerns
of the Athenians; therefore I hold my ears and tear myself away from him. And he is the
only person who ever made me ashamed, which you might think not to be in my nature,
and there is no one else who does the same. For I know that I cannot answer him or say
that I ought not to do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of popularity
gets the better of me. And therefore I run away and fly from him, and when I see him I
am ashamed of what I have confessed to him. Many a time have I wished that he were
dead, and yet I know that I should be much more sorry than glad, if he were to die: so
that I am at my wit’s end.
And this is what I and many others have suffered from the flute-playing of this satyr. Yet
hear me once more while I show you how exact the image is, and how marvellous his
power. For let me tell you; none of you know him; but I will reveal him to you; having
begun, I must go on. See you how fond he is of the fair? He is always with them and is
always being smitten by them, and then again he knows nothing and is ignorant of all
things—such is the appearance which he puts on. Is he not like a Silenus in this? To be
sure he is: his outer mask is the carved head of the Silenus; but, O my companions in
drink, when he is opened, what temperance there is residing within! Know you that
beauty and wealth and honour, at which the many wonder, are of no account with him,
and are utterly despised by him: he regards not at all the persons who are gifted with
them; mankind are nothing to him; all his life is spent in mocking and flouting at them.
But when I opened him, and looked within at his serious purpose, I saw in him divine
and golden images of such fascinating beauty that I was ready to do in a moment
whatever Socrates commanded: they may have escaped the observation of others, but I
saw them. Now I fancied that he was seriously enamoured of my beauty, and I thought
that I should therefore have a grand opportunity of hearing him tell what he knew, for I
had a wonderful opinion of the attractions of my youth. In the prosecution of this
design, when I next went to him, I sent away the attendant who usually accompanied me
(I will confess the whole truth, and beg you to listen; and if I speak falsely, do you,
Socrates, expose the falsehood). Well, he and I were alone together, and I thought that
when there was nobody with us, I should hear him speak the language which lovers use
to their loves when they are by themselves, and I was delighted. Nothing of the sort; he
conversed as usual, and spent the day with me and then went away. Afterwards I
challenged him to the palaestra; and he wrestled and closed with me several times when
there was no one present; I fancied that I might succeed in this manner. Not a bit; I
made no way with him. Lastly, as I had failed hitherto, I thought that I must take
stronger measures and attack him boldly, and, as I had begun, not give him up, but see
how matters stood between him and me. So I invited him to sup with me, just as if he
were a fair youth, and I a designing lover. He was not easily persuaded to come; he did,
however, after a while accept the invitation, and when he came the first time, he wanted
to go away at once as soon as supper was over, and I had not the face to detain him.
The second time, still in pursuance of my design, after we had supped, I went on
conversing far into the night, and when he wanted to go away, I pretended that the
hour was late and that he had much better remain. So he lay down on the couch next to
me, the same on which he had supped, and there was no one but ourselves sleeping in
the apartment. All this may be told without shame to any one. But what follows I could
hardly tell you if I were sober. Yet as the proverb says, ‘In vino veritas,’ whether with
boys, or without them (In allusion to two proverbs.); and therefore I must speak. Nor,
again, should I be justified in concealing the lofty actions of Socrates when I come to
praise him. Moreover I have felt the serpent’s sting; and he who has suffered, as they
say, is willing to tell his fellow-sufferers only, as they alone will be likely to understand
him, and will not be extreme in judging of the sayings or doings which have been wrung
from his agony. For I have been bitten by a more than viper’s tooth; I have known in my
soul, or in my heart, or in some other part, that worst of pangs, more violent in
ingenuous youth than any serpent’s tooth, the pang of philosophy, which will make a
man say or do anything. And you whom I see around me, Phaedrus and Agathon and
Eryximachus and Pausanias and Aristodemus and Aristophanes, all of you, and I need
not say Socrates himself, have had experience of the same madness and passion in your
longing after wisdom. Therefore listen and excuse my doings then and my sayings now.
But let the attendants and other profane and unmannered persons close up the doors of
their ears.
When the lamp was put out and the servants had gone away, I thought that I must be
plain with him and have no more ambiguity. So I gave him a shake, and I said: ‘Socrates,
are you asleep?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘Do you know what I am meditating? ‘What are you
meditating?’ he said. ‘I think,’ I replied, ‘that of all the lovers whom I have ever had you
are the only one who is worthy of me, and you appear to be too modest to speak. Now I
feel that I should be a fool to refuse you this or any other favour, and therefore I come
to lay at your feet all that I have and all that my friends have, in the hope that you will
assist me in the way of virtue, which I desire above all things, and in which I believe that
you can help me better than any one else. And I should certainly have more reason to
be ashamed of what wise men would say if I were to refuse a favour to such as you, than
of what the world, who are mostly fools, would say of me if I granted it.’ To these words
he replied in the ironical manner which is so characteristic of him:—‘Alcibiades, my
friend, you have indeed an elevated aim if what you say is true, and if there really is in
me any power by which you may become better; truly you must see in me some rare
beauty of a kind infinitely higher than any which I see in you. And therefore, if you mean
to share with me and to exchange beauty for beauty, you will have greatly the
advantage of me; you will gain true beauty in return for appearance—like Diomede,
gold in exchange for brass. But look again, sweet friend, and see whether you are not
deceived in me. The mind begins to grow critical when the bodily eye fails, and it will be
a long time before you get old.’ Hearing this, I said: ‘I have told you my purpose, which
is quite serious, and do you consider what you think best for you and me.’ ‘That is good,’
he said; ‘at some other time then we will consider and act as seems best about this and
about other matters.’ Whereupon, I fancied that he was smitten, and that the words
which I had uttered like arrows had wounded him, and so without waiting to hear more I
got up, and throwing my coat about him crept under his threadbare cloak, as the time
of year was winter, and there I lay during the whole night having this wonderful monster
in my arms. This again, Socrates, will not be denied by you. And yet, notwithstanding all,
he was so superior to my solicitations, so contemptuous and derisive and disdainful of
my beauty—which really, as I fancied, had some attractions—hear, O judges; for judges
you shall be of the haughty virtue of Socrates—nothing more happened, but in the
morning when I awoke (let all the gods and goddesses be my witnesses) I arose as from
the couch of a father or an elder brother.
What do you suppose must have been my feelings, after this rejection, at the thought of
my own dishonour? And yet I could not help wondering at his natural temperance and
self-restraint and manliness. I never imagined that I could have met with a man such as
he is in wisdom and endurance. And therefore I could not be angry with him or
renounce his company, any more than I could hope to win him. For I well knew that if
Ajax could not be wounded by steel, much less he by money; and my only chance of
captivating him by my personal attractions had failed. So I was at my wit’s end; no one
was ever more hopelessly enslaved by another. All this happened before he and I went
on the expedition to Potidaea; there we messed together, and I had the opportunity of
observing his extraordinary power of sustaining fatigue. His endurance was simply
marvellous when, being cut off from our supplies, we were compelled to go without
food—on such occasions, which often happen in time of war, he was superior not only
to me but to everybody; there was no one to be compared to him. Yet at a festival he
was the only person who had any real powers of enjoyment; though not willing to drink,
he could if compelled beat us all at that,—wonderful to relate! no human being had ever
seen Socrates drunk; and his powers, if I am not mistaken, will be tested before long. His
fortitude in enduring cold was also surprising. There was a severe frost, for the winter in
that region is really tremendous, and everybody else either remained indoors, or if they
went out had on an amazing quantity of clothes, and were well shod, and had their feet
swathed in felt and fleeces: in the midst of this, Socrates with his bare feet on the ice
and in his ordinary dress marched better than the other soldiers who had shoes, and
they looked daggers at him because he seemed to despise them.
I have told you one tale, and now I must tell you another, which is worth hearing,
‘Of the doings and sufferings of the enduring man’
while he was on the expedition. One morning he was thinking about something which
he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn
until noon—there he stood fixed in thought; and at noon attention was drawn to him,
and the rumour ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and
thinking about something ever since the break of day. At last, in the evening after
supper, some Ionians out of curiosity (I should explain that this was not in winter but in
summer), brought out their mats and slept in the open air that they might watch him
and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood until the following morning;
and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way
(compare supra). I will also tell, if you please—and indeed I am bound to tell—of his
courage in battle; for who but he saved my life? Now this was the engagement in which
I received the prize of valour: for I was wounded and he would not leave me, but he
rescued me and my arms; and he ought to have received the prize of valour which the
generals wanted to confer on me partly on account of my rank, and I told them so, (this,
again, Socrates will not impeach or deny), but he was more eager than the generals that
I and not he should have the prize. There was another occasion on which his behaviour
was very remarkable—in the flight of the army after the battle of Delium, where he
served among the heavy-armed,—I had a better opportunity of seeing him than at
Potidaea, for I was myself on horseback, and therefore comparatively out of danger. He
and Laches were retreating, for the troops were in flight, and I met them and told them
not to be discouraged, and promised to remain with them; and there you might see
him, Aristophanes, as you describe (Aristoph. Clouds), just as he is in the streets of
Athens, stalking like a pelican, and rolling his eyes, calmly contemplating enemies as
well as friends, and making very intelligible to anybody, even from a distance, that
whoever attacked him would be likely to meet with a stout resistance; and in this way he
and his companion escaped—for this is the sort of man who is never touched in war;
those only are pursued who are running away headlong. I particularly observed how
superior he was to Laches in presence of mind. Many are the marvels which I might
narrate in praise of Socrates; most of his ways might perhaps be paralleled in another
man, but his absolute unlikeness to any human being that is or ever has been is
perfectly astonishing. You may imagine Brasidas and others to have been like Achilles;
or you may imagine Nestor and Antenor to have been like Pericles; and the same may
be said of other famous men, but of this strange being you will never be able to find any
likeness, however remote, either among men who now are or who ever have been—
other than that which I have already suggested of Silenus and the satyrs; and they
represent in a figure not only himself, but his words. For, although I forgot to mention
this to you before, his words are like the images of Silenus which open; they are
ridiculous when you first hear them; he clothes himself in language that is like the skin
of the wanton satyr—for his talk is of pack-asses and smiths and cobblers and curriers,
and he is always repeating the same things in the same words (compare Gorg.), so that
any ignorant or inexperienced person might feel disposed to laugh at him; but he who
opens the bust and sees what is within will find that they are the only words which have
a meaning in them, and also the most divine, abounding in fair images of virtue, and of
the widest comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty of a good and
honourable man.
This, friends, is my praise of Socrates. I have added my blame of him for his ill-treatment
of me; and he has ill-treated not only me, but Charmides the son of Glaucon, and
Euthydemus the son of Diocles, and many others in the same way—beginning as their
lover he has ended by making them pay their addresses to him. Wherefore I say to you,
Agathon, ‘Be not deceived by him; learn from me and take warning, and do not be a
fool and learn by experience, as the proverb says.’
When Alcibiades had finished, there was a laugh at his outspokenness; for he seemed to
be still in love with Socrates. You are sober, Alcibiades, said Socrates, or you would
never have gone so far about to hide the purpose of your satyr’s praises, for all this long
story is only an ingenious circumlocution, of which the point comes in by the way at the
end; you want to get up a quarrel between me and Agathon, and your notion is that I
ought to love you and nobody else, and that you and you only ought to love Agathon.
But the plot of this Satyric or Silenic drama has been detected, and you must not allow
him, Agathon, to set us at variance.
I believe you are right, said Agathon, and I am disposed to think that his intention in
placing himself between you and me was only to divide us; but he shall gain nothing by
that move; for I will go and lie on the couch next to you.
Yes, yes, replied Socrates, by all means come here and lie on the couch below me.
Alas, said Alcibiades, how I am fooled by this man; he is determined to get the better of
me at every turn. I do beseech you, allow Agathon to lie between us.
Certainly not, said Socrates, as you praised me, and I in turn ought to praise my
neighbour on the right, he will be out of order in praising me again when he ought
rather to be praised by me, and I must entreat you to consent to this, and not be
jealous, for I have a great desire to praise the youth.
Hurrah! cried Agathon, I will rise instantly, that I may be praised by Socrates.
The usual way, said Alcibiades; where Socrates is, no one else has any chance with the
fair; and now how readily has he invented a specious reason for attracting Agathon to
himself.
Agathon arose in order that he might take his place on the couch by Socrates, when
suddenly a band of revellers entered, and spoiled the order of the banquet. Some one
who was going out having left the door open, they had found their way in, and made
themselves at home; great confusion ensued, and every one was compelled to drink
large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went
away—he himself fell asleep, and as the nights were long took a good rest: he was
awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were
either asleep, or had gone away; there remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and
Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and
Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus was only half awake, and he did not hear
the beginning of the discourse; the chief thing which he remembered was Socrates
compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with
that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this
they were constrained to assent, being drowsy, and not quite following the argument.
And first of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning,
Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, as his manner
was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the
evening he retired to rest at his own home.
THE END
THE REPUBLIC
BY PLATO
TRANSLATED BY
BENJAMIN
JOWETT
The Republic
INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.
The Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception of the Laws, and is
certainly the greatest of them. There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in
the Philebus and in the Sophist; the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and
institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the
Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no other Dialogue of Plato
has the same largeness of view and the same perfection of style; no other shows an
equal knowledge of the world, or contains more of those thoughts which are new as
well as old, and not of one age only but of all. Nowhere in Plato is there a deeper irony
or a greater wealth of humour or imagery, or more dramatic power. Nor in any other of
his writings is the attempt made to interweave life and speculation, or to connect
politics with philosophy. The Republic is the centre around which the other Dialogues
may be grouped; here philosophy reaches the highest point (cp, especially in Books V,
VI, VII) to which ancient thinkers ever attained. Plato among the Greeks, like Bacon
among the moderns, was the first who conceived a method of knowledge, although
neither of them always distinguished the bare outline or form from the substance of
truth; and both of them had to be content with an abstraction of science which was not
yet realized. He was the greatest metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in
him, more than in any other ancient thinker, the germs of future knowledge are
contained. The sciences of logic and psychology, which have supplied so many
instruments of thought to after-ages, are based upon the analyses of Socrates and Plato.
The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the
distinction between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between means and
ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational,
concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of pleasures and desires into necessary and
unnecessary—these and other great forms of thought are all of them to be found in the
Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato. The greatest of all logical truths,
and the one of which writers on philosophy are most apt to lose sight, the difference
between words and things, has been most strenuously insisted on by him (cp. Rep.;
Polit.; Cratyl), although he has not always avoided the confusion of them in his own
writings (e.g. Rep.). But he does not bind up truth in logical formulae,— logic is still
veiled in metaphysics; and the science which he imagines to ‘contemplate all truth and
all existence’ is very unlike the doctrine of the syllogism which Aristotle claims to have
discovered (Soph. Elenchi).
Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part of a still larger design
which was to have included an ideal history of Athens, as well as a political and physical
philosophy. The fragment of the Critias has given birth to a world-famous fiction,
second only in importance to the tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur; and is said as a
fact to have inspired some of the early navigators of the sixteenth century. This mythical
tale, of which the subject was a history of the wars of the Athenians against the Island of
Atlantis, is supposed to be founded upon an unfinished poem of Solon, to which it
would have stood in the same relation as the writings of the logographers to the poems
of Homer. It would have told of a struggle for Liberty (cp. Tim.), intended to represent
the conflict of Persia and Hellas. We may judge from the noble commencement of the
Timaeus, from the fragment of the Critias itself, and from the third book of the Laws, in
what manner Plato would have treated this high argument. We can only guess why the
great design was abandoned; perhaps because Plato became sensible of some
incongruity in a fictitious history, or because he had lost his interest in it, or because
advancing years forbade the completion of it; and we may please ourselves with the
fancy that had this imaginary narrative ever been finished, we should have found Plato
himself sympathising with the struggle for Hellenic independence (cp. Laws), singing a
hymn of triumph over Marathon and Salamis, perhaps making the reflection of
Herodotus where he contemplates the growth of the Athenian empire—‘How brave a
thing is freedom of speech, which has made the Athenians so far exceed every other
state of Hellas in greatness!’ or, more probably, attributing the victory to the ancient
good order of Athens and to the favor of Apollo and Athene (cp. Introd. to Critias).
Again, Plato may be regarded as the ‘captain’ (‘arhchegoz’) or leader of a goodly band
of followers; for in the Republic is to be found the original of Cicero’s De Republica, of
St. Augustine’s City of God, of the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous
other imaginary States which are framed upon the same model. The extent to which
Aristotle or the Aristotelian school were indebted to him in the Politics has been little
recognised, and the recognition is the more necessary because it is not made by
Aristotle himself. The two philosophers had more in common than they were conscious
of; and probably some elements of Plato remain still undetected in Aristotle. In English
philosophy too, many affinities may be traced, not only in the works of the Cambridge
Platonists, but in great original writers like Berkeley or Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas.
That there is a truth higher than experience, of which the mind bears witness to herself,
is a conviction which in our own generation has been enthusiastically asserted, and is
perhaps gaining ground. Of the Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a new
life into the world Plato has had the greatest influence. The Republic of Plato is also the
first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean
Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendants. Like Dante or Bunyan, he has a
revelation of another life; like Bacon, he is profoundly impressed with the unity of
knowledge; in the early Church he exercised a real influence on theology, and at the
Revival of Literature on politics. Even the fragments of his words when ‘repeated at
second-hand’ (Symp.) have in all ages ravished the hearts of men, who have seen
reflected in them their own higher nature. He is the father of idealism in philosophy, in
politics, in literature. And many of the latest conceptions of modern thinkers and
statesmen, such as the unity of knowledge, the reign of law, and the equality of the
sexes, have been anticipated in a dream by him.
The argument of the Republic is the search after Justice, the nature of which is first
hinted at by Cephalus, the just and blameless old man—then discussed on the basis of
proverbial morality by Socrates and Polemarchus— then caricatured by Thrasymachus
and partially explained by Socrates— reduced to an abstraction by Glaucon and
Adeimantus, and having become invisible in the individual reappears at length in the
ideal State which is constructed by Socrates. The first care of the rulers is to be
education, of which an outline is drawn after the old Hellenic model, providing only for
an improved religion and morality, and more simplicity in music and gymnastic, a
manlier strain of poetry, and greater harmony of the individual and the State. We are
thus led on to the conception of a higher State, in which ‘no man calls anything his
own,’ and in which there is neither ‘marrying nor giving in marriage,’ and ‘kings are
philosophers’ and ‘philosophers are kings;’ and there is another and higher education,
intellectual as well as moral and religious, of science as well as of art, and not of youth
only but of the whole of life. Such a State is hardly to be realized in this world and
quickly degenerates. To the perfect ideal succeeds the government of the soldier and
the lover of honour, this again declining into democracy, and democracy into tyranny, in
an imaginary but regular order having not much resemblance to the actual facts. When
‘the wheel has come full circle’ we do not begin again with a new period of human life;
but we have passed from the best to the worst, and there we end. The subject is then
changed and the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy which had been more lightly
treated in the earlier books of the Republic is now resumed and fought out to a
conclusion. Poetry is discovered to be an imitation thrice removed from the truth, and
Homer, as well as the dramatic poets, having been condemned as an imitator, is sent
into banishment along with them. And the idea of the State is supplemented by the
revelation of a future life.
The division into books, like all similar divisions (Cp. Sir G.C. Lewis in the Classical
Museum.), is probably later than the age of Plato. The natural divisions are five in
number;—(1) Book I and the first half of Book II down to the paragraph beginning, ‘I had
always admired the genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus,’ which is introductory; the first
book containing a refutation of the popular and sophistical notions of justice, and
concluding, like some of the earlier Dialogues, without arriving at any definite result. To
this is appended a restatement of the nature of justice according to common opinion,
and an answer is demanded to the question—What is justice, stripped of appearances?
The second division (2) includes the remainder of the second and the whole of the third
and fourth books, which are mainly occupied with the construction of the first State and
the first education. The third division (3) consists of the fifth, sixth, and seventh books, in
which philosophy rather than justice is the subject of enquiry, and the second State is
constructed on principles of communism and ruled by philosophers, and the
contemplation of the idea of good takes the place of the social and political virtues. In
the eighth and ninth books (4) the perversions of States and of the individuals who
correspond to them are reviewed in succession; and the nature of pleasure and the
principle of tyranny are further analysed in the individual man. The tenth book (5) is the
conclusion of the whole, in which the relations of philosophy to poetry are finally
determined, and the happiness of the citizens in this life, which has now been assured, is
crowned by the vision of another.
Or a more general division into two parts may be adopted; the first (Books I — IV)
containing the description of a State framed generally in accordance with Hellenic
notions of religion and morality, while in the second (Books V — X) the Hellenic State is
transformed into an ideal kingdom of philosophy, of which all other governments are
the perversions. These two points of view are really opposed, and the opposition is only
veiled by the genius of Plato. The Republic, like the Phaedrus (see Introduction to
Phaedrus), is an imperfect whole; the higher light of philosophy breaks through the
regularity of the Hellenic temple, which at last fades away into the heavens. Whether this
imperfection of structure arises from an enlargement of the plan; or from the imperfect
reconcilement in the writer’s own mind of the struggling elements of thought which are
now first brought together by him; or, perhaps, from the composition of the work at
different times—are questions, like the similar question about the Iliad and the Odyssey,
which are worth asking, but which cannot have a distinct answer. In the age of Plato
there was no regular mode of publication, and an author would have the less scruple in
altering or adding to a work which was known only to a few of his friends. There is no
absurdity in supposing that he may have laid his labours aside for a time, or turned from
one work to another; and such interruptions would be more likely to occur in the case of
a long than of a short writing. In all attempts to determine the chronological order of
the Platonic writings on internal evidence, this uncertainty about any single Dialogue
being composed at one time is a disturbing element, which must be admitted to affect
longer works, such as the Republic and the Laws, more than shorter ones. But, on the
other hand, the seeming discrepancies of the Republic may only arise out of the
discordant elements which the philosopher has attempted to unite in a single whole,
perhaps without being himself able to recognise the inconsistency which is obvious to
us. For there is a judgment of after ages which few great writers have ever been able to
anticipate for themselves. They do not perceive the want of connexion in their own
writings, or the gaps in their systems which are visible enough to those who come after
them. In the beginnings of literature and philosophy, amid the first efforts of thought
and language, more inconsistencies occur than now, when the paths of speculation are
well worn and the meaning of words precisely defined. For consistency, too, is the
growth of time; and some of the greatest creations of the human mind have been
wanting in unity. Tried by this test, several of the Platonic Dialogues, according to our
modern ideas, appear to be defective, but the deficiency is no proof that they were
composed at different times or by different hands. And the supposition that the
Republic was written uninterruptedly and by a continuous effort is in some degree
confirmed by the numerous references from one part of the work to another.
The second title, ‘Concerning Justice,’ is not the one by which the Republic is quoted,
either by Aristotle or generally in antiquity, and, like the other second titles of the
Platonic Dialogues, may therefore be assumed to be of later date. Morgenstern and
others have asked whether the definition of justice, which is the professed aim, or the
construction of the State is the principal argument of the work. The answer is, that the
two blend in one, and are two faces of the same truth; for justice is the order of the
State, and the State is the visible embodiment of justice under the conditions of human
society. The one is the soul and the other is the body, and the Greek ideal of the State,
as of the individual, is a fair mind in a fair body. In Hegelian phraseology the state is the
reality of which justice is the idea. Or, described in Christian language, the kingdom of
God is within, and yet developes into a Church or external kingdom; ‘the house not
made with hands, eternal in the heavens,’ is reduced to the proportions of an earthly
building. Or, to use a Platonic image, justice and the State are the warp and the woof
which run through the whole texture. And when the constitution of the State is
completed, the conception of justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the same or
different names throughout the work, both as the inner law of the individual soul, and
finally as the principle of rewards and punishments in another life. The virtues are based
on justice, of which common honesty in buying and selling is the shadow, and justice is
based on the idea of good, which is the harmony of the world, and is reflected both in
the institutions of states and in motions of the heavenly bodies (cp. Tim.). The Timaeus,
which takes up the political rather than the ethical side of the Republic, and is chiefly
occupied with hypotheses concerning the outward world, yet contains many indications
that the same law is supposed to reign over the State, over nature, and over man.
Too much, however, has been made of this question both in ancient and modern times.
There is a stage of criticism in which all works, whether of nature or of art, are referred
to design. Now in ancient writings, and indeed in literature generally, there remains
often a large element which was not comprehended in the original design. For the plan
grows under the author’s hand; new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has
not worked out the argument to the end before he begins. The reader who seeks to find
some one idea under which the whole may be conceived, must necessarily seize on the
vaguest and most general. Thus Stallbaum, who is dissatisfied with the ordinary
explanations of the argument of the Republic, imagines himself to have found the true
argument ‘in the representation of human life in a State perfected by justice, and
governed according to the idea of good.’ There may be some use in such general
descriptions, but they can hardly be said to express the design of the writer. The truth is,
that we may as well speak of many designs as of one; nor need anything be excluded
from the plan of a great work to which the mind is naturally led by the association of
ideas, and which does not interfere with the general purpose. What kind or degree of
unity is to be sought after in a building, in the plastic arts, in poetry, in prose, is a
problem which has to be determined relatively to the subject-matter. To Plato himself,
the enquiry ‘what was the intention of the writer,’ or ‘what was the principal argument of
the Republic’ would have been hardly intelligible, and therefore had better be at once
dismissed (cp. the Introduction to the Phaedrus).
Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which, to Plato’s own mind,
are most naturally represented in the form of the State? Just as in the Jewish prophets
the reign of Messiah, or ‘the day of the Lord,’ or the suffering Servant or people of God,
or the ‘Sun of righteousness with healing in his wings’ only convey, to us at least, their
great spiritual ideals, so through the Greek State Plato reveals to us his own thoughts
about divine perfection, which is the idea of good—like the sun in the visible world;—
about human perfection, which is justice—about education beginning in youth and
continuing in later years—about poets and sophists and tyrants who are the false
teachers and evil rulers of mankind —about ‘the world’ which is the embodiment of
them—about a kingdom which exists nowhere upon earth but is laid up in heaven to be
the pattern and rule of human life. No such inspired creation is at unity with itself, any
more than the clouds of heaven when the sun pierces through them. Every shade of
light and dark, of truth, and of fiction which is the veil of truth, is allowable in a work of
philosophical imagination. It is not all on the same plane; it easily passes from ideas to
myths and fancies, from facts to figures of speech. It is not prose but poetry, at least a
great part of it, and ought not to be judged by the rules of logic or the probabilities of
history. The writer is not fashioning his ideas into an artistic whole; they take possession
of him and are too much for him. We have no need therefore to discuss whether a State
such as Plato has conceived is practicable or not, or whether the outward form or the
inward life came first into the mind of the writer. For the practicability of his ideas has
nothing to do with their truth; and the highest thoughts to which he attains may be truly
said to bear the greatest ‘marks of design’— justice more than the external frame-work
of the State, the idea of good more than justice. The great science of dialectic or the
organisation of ideas has no real content; but is only a type of the method or spirit in
which the higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all time and all
existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that Plato reaches the ‘summit of
speculation,’ and these, although they fail to satisfy the requirements of a modern
thinker, may therefore be regarded as the most important, as they are also the most
original, portions of the work.
It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question which has been raised by
Boeckh, respecting the imaginary date at which the conversation was held (the year 411
B.C. which is proposed by him will do as well as any other); for a writer of fiction, and
especially a writer who, like Plato, is notoriously careless of chronology (cp. Rep., Symp.,
etc.), only aims at general probability. Whether all the persons mentioned in the
Republic could ever have met at any one time is not a difficulty which would have
occurred to an Athenian reading the work forty years later, or to Plato himself at the
time of writing (any more than to Shakespeare respecting one of his own dramas); and
need not greatly trouble us now. Yet this may be a question having no answer ‘which is
still worth asking,’ because the investigation shows that we cannot argue historically
from the dates in Plato; it would be useless therefore to waste time in inventing farfetched
reconcilements of them in order to avoid chronological difficulties, such, for
example, as the conjecture of C.F. Hermann, that Glaucon and Adeimantus are not the
brothers but the uncles of Plato (cp. Apol.), or the fancy of Stallbaum that Plato
intentionally left anachronisms indicating the dates at which some of his Dialogues were
written.
The principal characters in the Republic are Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus,
Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Cephalus appears in the introduction only,
Polemarchus drops at the end of the first argument, and Thrasymachus is reduced to
silence at the close of the first book. The main discussion is carried on by Socrates,
Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Among the company are Lysias (the orator) and Euthydemus,
the sons of Cephalus and brothers of Polemarchus, an unknown Charmantides—these
are mute auditors; also there is Cleitophon, who once interrupts, where, as in the
Dialogue which bears his name, he appears as the friend and ally of Thrasymachus.
Cephalus, the patriarch of the house, has been appropriately engaged in offering a
sacrifice. He is the pattern of an old man who has almost done with life, and is at peace
with himself and with all mankind. He feels that he is drawing nearer to the world below,
and seems to linger around the memory of the past. He is eager that Socrates should
come to visit him, fond of the poetry of the last generation, happy in the consciousness
of a well-spent life, glad at having escaped from the tyranny of youthful lusts. His love of
conversation, his affection, his indifference to riches, even his garrulity, are interesting
traits of character. He is not one of those who have nothing to say, because their whole
mind has been absorbed in making money. Yet he acknowledges that riches have the
advantage of placing men above the temptation to dishonesty or falsehood. The
respectful attention shown to him by Socrates, whose love of conversation, no less than
the mission imposed upon him by the Oracle, leads him to ask questions of all men,
young and old alike, should also be noted. Who better suited to raise the question of
justice than Cephalus, whose life might seem to be the expression of it? The moderation
with which old age is pictured by Cephalus as a very tolerable portion of existence is
characteristic, not only of him, but of Greek feeling generally, and contrasts with the
exaggeration of Cicero in the De Senectute. The evening of life is described by Plato in
the most expressive manner, yet with the fewest possible touches. As Cicero remarks
(Ep. ad Attic.), the aged Cephalus would have been out of place in the discussion which
follows, and which he could neither have understood nor taken part in without a
violation of dramatic propriety (cp. Lysimachus in the Laches).
His ‘son and heir’ Polemarchus has the frankness and impetuousness of youth; he is for
detaining Socrates by force in the opening scene, and will not ‘let him off’ on the subject
of women and children. Like Cephalus, he is limited in his point of view, and represents
the proverbial stage of morality which has rules of life rather than principles; and he
quotes Simonides (cp. Aristoph. Clouds) as his father had quoted Pindar. But after this
he has no more to say; the answers which he makes are only elicited from him by the
dialectic of Socrates. He has not yet experienced the influence of the Sophists like
Glaucon and Adeimantus, nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them; he
belongs to the pre-Socratic or pre-dialectical age. He is incapable of arguing, and is
bewildered by Socrates to such a degree that he does not know what he is saying. He is
made to admit that justice is a thief, and that the virtues follow the analogy of the arts.
From his brother Lysias (contra Eratosth.) we learn that he fell a victim to the Thirty
Tyrants, but no allusion is here made to his fate, nor to the circumstance that Cephalus
and his family were of Syracusan origin, and had migrated from Thurii to Athens.
The ‘Chalcedonian giant,’ Thrasymachus, of whom we have already heard in the
Phaedrus, is the personification of the Sophists, according to Plato’s conception of them,
in some of their worst characteristics. He is vain and blustering, refusing to discourse
unless he is paid, fond of making an oration, and hoping thereby to escape the
inevitable Socrates; but a mere child in argument, and unable to foresee that the next
‘move’ (to use a Platonic expression) will ‘shut him up.’ He has reached the stage of
framing general notions, and in this respect is in advance of Cephalus and Polemarchus.
But he is incapable of defending them in a discussion, and vainly tries to cover his
confusion with banter and insolence. Whether such doctrines as are attributed to him by
Plato were really held either by him or by any other Sophist is uncertain; in the infancy
of philosophy serious errors about morality might easily grow up—they are certainly put
into the mouths of speakers in Thucydides; but we are concerned at present with Plato’s
description of him, and not with the historical reality. The inequality of the contest adds
greatly to the humour of the scene. The pompous and empty Sophist is utterly helpless
in the hands of the great master of dialectic, who knows how to touch all the springs of
vanity and weakness in him. He is greatly irritated by the irony of Socrates, but his noisy
and imbecile rage only lays him more and more open to the thrusts of his assailant. His
determination to cram down their throats, or put ‘bodily into their souls’ his own words,
elicits a cry of horror from Socrates. The state of his temper is quite as worthy of remark
as the process of the argument. Nothing is more amusing than his complete submission
when he has been once thoroughly beaten. At first he seems to continue the discussion
with reluctance, but soon with apparent good-will, and he even testifies his interest at a
later stage by one or two occasional remarks. When attacked by Glaucon he is
humorously protected by Socrates ‘as one who has never been his enemy and is now his
friend.’ From Cicero and Quintilian and from Aristotle’s Rhetoric we learn that the
Sophist whom Plato has made so ridiculous was a man of note whose writings were
preserved in later ages. The play on his name which was made by his contemporary
Herodicus (Aris. Rhet.), ‘thou wast ever bold in battle,’ seems to show that the
description of him is not devoid of verisimilitude.
When Thrasymachus has been silenced, the two principal respondents, Glaucon and
Adeimantus, appear on the scene: here, as in Greek tragedy (cp. Introd. to Phaedo),
three actors are introduced. At first sight the two sons of Ariston may seem to wear a
family likeness, like the two friends Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo. But on a nearer
examination of them the similarity vanishes, and they are seen to be distinct characters.
Glaucon is the impetuous youth who can ‘just never have enough of fechting’ (cp. the
character of him in Xen. Mem. iii. 6); the man of pleasure who is acquainted with the
mysteries of love; the ‘juvenis qui gaudet canibus,’ and who improves the breed of
animals; the lover of art and music who has all the experiences of youthful life. He is full
of quickness and penetration, piercing easily below the clumsy platitudes of
Thrasymachus to the real difficulty; he turns out to the light the seamy side of human
life, and yet does not lose faith in the just and true. It is Glaucon who seizes what may
be termed the ludicrous relation of the philosopher to the world, to whom a state of
simplicity is ‘a city of pigs,’ who is always prepared with a jest when the argument offers
him an opportunity, and who is ever ready to second the humour of Socrates and to
appreciate the ridiculous, whether in the connoisseurs of music, or in the lovers of
theatricals, or in the fantastic behaviour of the citizens of democracy. His weaknesses are
several times alluded to by Socrates, who, however, will not allow him to be attacked by
his brother Adeimantus. He is a soldier, and, like Adeimantus, has been distinguished at
the battle of Megara (anno 456?)...The character of Adeimantus is deeper and graver,
and the profounder objections are commonly put into his mouth. Glaucon is more
demonstrative, and generally opens the game. Adeimantus pursues the argument
further. Glaucon has more of the liveliness and quick sympathy of youth; Adeimantus
has the maturer judgment of a grown-up man of the world. In the second book, when
Glaucon insists that justice and injustice shall be considered without regard to their
consequences, Adeimantus remarks that they are regarded by mankind in general only
for the sake of their consequences; and in a similar vein of reflection he urges at the
beginning of the fourth book that Socrates fails in making his citizens happy, and is
answered that happiness is not the first but the second thing, not the direct aim but the
indirect consequence of the good government of a State. In the discussion about
religion and mythology, Adeimantus is the respondent, but Glaucon breaks in with a
slight jest, and carries on the conversation in a lighter tone about music and gymnastic
to the end of the book. It is Adeimantus again who volunteers the criticism of common
sense on the Socratic method of argument, and who refuses to let Socrates pass lightly
over the question of women and children. It is Adeimantus who is the respondent in the
more argumentative, as Glaucon in the lighter and more imaginative portions of the
Dialogue. For example, throughout the greater part of the sixth book, the causes of the
corruption of philosophy and the conception of the idea of good are discussed with
Adeimantus. Glaucon resumes his place of principal respondent; but he has a difficulty
in apprehending the higher education of Socrates, and makes some false hits in the
course of the discussion. Once more Adeimantus returns with the allusion to his brother
Glaucon whom he compares to the contentious State; in the next book he is again
superseded, and Glaucon continues to the end.
Thus in a succession of characters Plato represents the successive stages of morality,
beginning with the Athenian gentleman of the olden time, who is followed by the
practical man of that day regulating his life by proverbs and saws; to him succeeds the
wild generalization of the Sophists, and lastly come the young disciples of the great
teacher, who know the sophistical arguments but will not be convinced by them, and
desire to go deeper into the nature of things. These too, like Cephalus, Polemarchus,
Thrasymachus, are clearly distinguished from one another. Neither in the Republic, nor
in any other Dialogue of Plato, is a single character repeated.
The delineation of Socrates in the Republic is not wholly consistent. In the first book we
have more of the real Socrates, such as he is depicted in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,
in the earliest Dialogues of Plato, and in the Apology. He is ironical, provoking,
questioning, the old enemy of the Sophists, ready to put on the mask of Silenus as well
as to argue seriously. But in the sixth book his enmity towards the Sophists abates; he
acknowledges that they are the representatives rather than the corrupters of the world.
He also becomes more dogmatic and constructive, passing beyond the range either of
the political or the speculative ideas of the real Socrates. In one passage Plato himself
seems to intimate that the time had now come for Socrates, who had passed his whole
life in philosophy, to give his own opinion and not to be always repeating the notions of
other men. There is no evidence that either the idea of good or the conception of a
perfect state were comprehended in the Socratic teaching, though he certainly dwelt on
the nature of the universal and of final causes (cp. Xen. Mem.; Phaedo); and a deep
thinker like him, in his thirty or forty years of public teaching, could hardly have failed to
touch on the nature of family relations, for which there is also some positive evidence in
the Memorabilia (Mem.) The Socratic method is nominally retained; and every inference
is either put into the mouth of the respondent or represented as the common discovery
of him and Socrates. But any one can see that this is a mere form, of which the
affectation grows wearisome as the work advances. The method of enquiry has passed
into a method of teaching in which by the help of interlocutors the same thesis is looked
at from various points of view. The nature of the process is truly characterized by
Glaucon, when he describes himself as a companion who is not good for much in an
investigation, but can see what he is shown, and may, perhaps, give the answer to a
question more fluently than another.
Neither can we be absolutely certain that Socrates himself taught the immortality of the
soul, which is unknown to his disciple Glaucon in the Republic (cp. Apol.); nor is there
any reason to suppose that he used myths or revelations of another world as a vehicle
of instruction, or that he would have banished poetry or have denounced the Greek
mythology. His favorite oath is retained, and a slight mention is made of the
daemonium, or internal sign, which is alluded to by Socrates as a phenomenon peculiar
to himself. A real element of Socratic teaching, which is more prominent in the Republic
than in any of the other Dialogues of Plato, is the use of example and illustration
(Greek): ‘Let us apply the test of common instances.’ ‘You,’ says Adeimantus, ironically, in
the sixth book, ‘are so unaccustomed to speak in images.’ And this use of examples or
images, though truly Socratic in origin, is enlarged by the genius of Plato into the form
of an allegory or parable, which embodies in the concrete what has been already
described, or is about to be described, in the abstract. Thus the figure of the cave in
Book VII is a recapitulation of the divisions of knowledge in Book VI. The composite
animal in Book IX is an allegory of the parts of the soul. The noble captain and the ship
and the true pilot in Book VI are a figure of the relation of the people to the
philosophers in the State which has been described. Other figures, such as the dog, or
the marriage of the portionless maiden, or the drones and wasps in the eighth and ninth
books, also form links of connexion in long passages, or are used to recall previous
discussions.
Plato is most true to the character of his master when he describes him as ‘not of this
world.’ And with this representation of him the ideal state and the other paradoxes of
the Republic are quite in accordance, though they cannot be shown to have been
speculations of Socrates. To him, as to other great teachers both philosophical and
religious, when they looked upward, the world seemed to be the embodiment of error
and evil. The common sense of mankind has revolted against this view, or has only
partially admitted it. And even in Socrates himself the sterner judgement of the
multitude at times passes into a sort of ironical pity or love. Men in general are
incapable of philosophy, and are therefore at enmity with the philosopher; but their
misunderstanding of him is unavoidable: for they have never seen him as he truly is in
his own image; they are only acquainted with artificial systems possessing no native
force of truth— words which admit of many applications. Their leaders have nothing to
measure with, and are therefore ignorant of their own stature. But they are to be pitied
or laughed at, not to be quarrelled with; they mean well with their nostrums, if they
could only learn that they are cutting off a Hydra’s head. This moderation towards those
who are in error is one of the most characteristic features of Socrates in the Republic. In
all the different representations of Socrates, whether of Xenophon or Plato, and amid
the differences of the earlier or later Dialogues, he always retains the character of the
unwearied and disinterested seeker after truth, without which he would have ceased to
be Socrates.
Leaving the characters we may now analyse the contents of the Republic, and then
proceed to consider (1) The general aspects of this Hellenic ideal of the State, (2) The
modern lights in which the thoughts of Plato may be read.

BOOK I.

The Republic opens with a truly Greek scene—a festival in honour of the goddess Bendis
which is held in the Piraeus; to this is added the promise of an equestrian torch-race in
the evening. The whole work is supposed to be recited by Socrates on the day after the
festival to a small party, consisting of Critias, Timaeus, Hermocrates, and another; this we
learn from the first words of the Timaeus.
When the rhetorical advantage of reciting the Dialogue has been gained, the attention is
not distracted by any reference to the audience; nor is the reader further reminded of
the extraordinary length of the narrative. Of the numerous company, three only take any
serious part in the discussion; nor are we informed whether in the evening they went to
the torch-race, or talked, as in the Symposium, through the night. The manner in which
the conversation has arisen is described as follows:—Socrates and his companion
Glaucon are about to leave the festival when they are detained by a message from
Polemarchus, who speedily appears accompanied by Adeimantus, the brother of
Glaucon, and with playful violence compels them to remain, promising them not only
the torch-race, but the pleasure of conversation with the young, which to Socrates is a
far greater attraction. They return to the house of Cephalus, Polemarchus’ father, now in
extreme old age, who is found sitting upon a cushioned seat crowned for a sacrifice.
‘You should come to me oftener, Socrates, for I am too old to go to you; and at my time
of life, having lost other pleasures, I care the more for conversation.’ Socrates asks him
what he thinks of age, to which the old man replies, that the sorrows and discontents of
age are to be attributed to the tempers of men, and that age is a time of peace in which
the tyranny of the passions is no longer felt. Yes, replies Socrates, but the world will say,
Cephalus, that you are happy in old age because you are rich. ‘And there is something in
what they say, Socrates, but not so much as they imagine—as Themistocles replied to
the Seriphian, “Neither you, if you had been an Athenian, nor I, if I had been a Seriphian,
would ever have been famous,” I might in like manner reply to you, Neither a good poor
man can be happy in age, nor yet a bad rich man.’ Socrates remarks that Cephalus
appears not to care about riches, a quality which he ascribes to his having inherited, not
acquired them, and would like to know what he considers to be the chief advantage of
them. Cephalus answers that when you are old the belief in the world below grows upon
you, and then to have done justice and never to have been compelled to do injustice
through poverty, and never to have deceived anyone, are felt to be unspeakable
blessings. Socrates, who is evidently preparing for an argument, next asks, What is the
meaning of the word justice? To tell the truth and pay your debts? No more than this?
Or must we admit exceptions? Ought I, for example, to put back into the hands of my
friend, who has gone mad, the sword which I borrowed of him when he was in his right
mind? ‘There must be exceptions.’ ‘And yet,’ says Polemarchus, ‘the definition which has
been given has the authority of Simonides.’ Here Cephalus retires to look after the
sacrifices, and bequeaths, as Socrates facetiously remarks, the possession of the
argument to his heir, Polemarchus...
The description of old age is finished, and Plato, as his manner is, has touched the keynote
of the whole work in asking for the definition of justice, first suggesting the
question which Glaucon afterwards pursues respecting external goods, and preparing
for the concluding mythus of the world below in the slight allusion of Cephalus. The
portrait of the just man is a natural frontispiece or introduction to the long discourse
which follows, and may perhaps imply that in all our perplexity about the nature of
justice, there is no difficulty in discerning ‘who is a just man.’ The first explanation has
been supported by a saying of Simonides; and now Socrates has a mind to show that
the resolution of justice into two unconnected precepts, which have no common
principle, fails to satisfy the demands of dialectic.
...He proceeds: What did Simonides mean by this saying of his? Did he mean that I was
to give back arms to a madman? ‘No, not in that case, not if the parties are friends, and
evil would result. He meant that you were to do what was proper, good to friends and
harm to enemies.’ Every act does something to somebody; and following this analogy,
Socrates asks, What is this due and proper thing which justice does, and to whom? He is
answered that justice does good to friends and harm to enemies. But in what way good
or harm? ‘In making alliances with the one, and going to war with the other.’ Then in
time of peace what is the good of justice? The answer is that justice is of use in
contracts, and contracts are money partnerships. Yes; but how in such partnerships is
the just man of more use than any other man? ‘When you want to have money safely
kept and not used.’ Then justice will be useful when money is useless. And there is
another difficulty: justice, like the art of war or any other art, must be of opposites, good
at attack as well as at defence, at stealing as well as at guarding. But then justice is a
thief, though a hero notwithstanding, like Autolycus, the Homeric hero, who was
‘excellent above all men in theft and perjury’—to such a pass have you and Homer and
Simonides brought us; though I do not forget that the thieving must be for the good of
friends and the harm of enemies. And still there arises another question: Are friends to
be interpreted as real or seeming; enemies as real or seeming? And are our friends to be
only the good, and our enemies to be the evil? The answer is, that we must do good to
our seeming and real good friends, and evil to our seeming and real evil enemies—
good to the good, evil to the evil. But ought we to render evil for evil at all, when to do
so will only make men more evil? Can justice produce injustice any more than the art of
horsemanship can make bad horsemen, or heat produce cold? The final conclusion is,
that no sage or poet ever said that the just return evil for evil; this was a maxim of some
rich and mighty man, Periander, Perdiccas, or Ismenias the Theban (about B.C. 398–
381)...
Thus the first stage of aphoristic or unconscious morality is shown to be inadequate to
the wants of the age; the authority of the poets is set aside, and through the winding
mazes of dialectic we make an approach to the Christian precept of forgiveness of
injuries. Similar words are applied by the Persian mystic poet to the Divine being when
the questioning spirit is stirred within him:—‘If because I do evil, Thou punishest me by
evil, what is the difference between Thee and me?’ In this both Plato and Kheyam rise
above the level of many Christian (?) theologians. The first definition of justice easily
passes into the second; for the simple words ‘to speak the truth and pay your debts’ is
substituted the more abstract ‘to do good to your friends and harm to your enemies.’
Either of these explanations gives a sufficient rule of life for plain men, but they both fall
short of the precision of philosophy. We may note in passing the antiquity of casuistry,
which not only arises out of the conflict of established principles in particular cases, but
also out of the effort to attain them, and is prior as well as posterior to our fundamental
notions of morality. The ‘interrogation’ of moral ideas; the appeal to the authority of
Homer; the conclusion that the maxim, ‘Do good to your friends and harm to your
enemies,’ being erroneous, could not have been the word of any great man, are all of
them very characteristic of the Platonic Socrates.
...Here Thrasymachus, who has made several attempts to interrupt, but has hitherto
been kept in order by the company, takes advantage of a pause and rushes into the
arena, beginning, like a savage animal, with a roar. ‘Socrates,’ he says, ‘what folly is
this?—Why do you agree to be vanquished by one another in a pretended argument?’
He then prohibits all the ordinary definitions of justice; to which Socrates replies that he
cannot tell how many twelve is, if he is forbidden to say 2 x 6, or 3 x 4, or 6 x 2, or 4 x 3.
At first Thrasymachus is reluctant to argue; but at length, with a promise of payment on
the part of the company and of praise from Socrates, he is induced to open the game.
‘Listen,’ he says, ‘my answer is that might is right, justice the interest of the stronger:
now praise me.’ Let me understand you first. Do you mean that because Polydamas the
wrestler, who is stronger than we are, finds the eating of beef for his interest, the eating
of beef is also for our interest, who are not so strong? Thrasymachus is indignant at the
illustration, and in pompous words, apparently intended to restore dignity to the
argument, he explains his meaning to be that the rulers make laws for their own
interests. But suppose, says Socrates, that the ruler or stronger makes a mistake—then
the interest of the stronger is not his interest. Thrasymachus is saved from this speedy
downfall by his disciple Cleitophon, who introduces the word ‘thinks;’—not the actual
interest of the ruler, but what he thinks or what seems to be his interest, is justice. The
contradiction is escaped by the unmeaning evasion: for though his real and apparent
interests may differ, what the ruler thinks to be his interest will always remain what he
thinks to be his interest.
Of course this was not the original assertion, nor is the new interpretation accepted by
Thrasymachus himself. But Socrates is not disposed to quarrel about words, if, as he
significantly insinuates, his adversary has changed his mind. In what follows
Thrasymachus does in fact withdraw his admission that the ruler may make a mistake,
for he affirms that the ruler as a ruler is infallible. Socrates is quite ready to accept the
new position, which he equally turns against Thrasymachus by the help of the analogy
of the arts. Every art or science has an interest, but this interest is to be distinguished
from the accidental interest of the artist, and is only concerned with the good of the
things or persons which come under the art. And justice has an interest which is the
interest not of the ruler or judge, but of those who come under his sway.
Thrasymachus is on the brink of the inevitable conclusion, when he makes a bold
diversion. ‘Tell me, Socrates,’ he says, ‘have you a nurse?’ What a question! Why do you
ask? ‘Because, if you have, she neglects you and lets you go about drivelling, and has
not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep. For you fancy that
shepherds and rulers never think of their own interest, but only of their sheep or
subjects, whereas the truth is that they fatten them for their use, sheep and subjects
alike. And experience proves that in every relation of life the just man is the loser and
the unjust the gainer, especially where injustice is on the grand scale, which is quite
another thing from the petty rogueries of swindlers and burglars and robbers of
temples. The language of men proves this—our ‘gracious’ and ‘blessed’ tyrant and the
like—all which tends to show (1) that justice is the interest of the stronger; and (2) that
injustice is more profitable and also stronger than justice.’
Thrasymachus, who is better at a speech than at a close argument, having deluged the
company with words, has a mind to escape. But the others will not let him go, and
Socrates adds a humble but earnest request that he will not desert them at such a crisis
of their fate. ‘And what can I do more for you?’ he says; ‘would you have me put the
words bodily into your souls?’ God forbid! replies Socrates; but we want you to be
consistent in the use of terms, and not to employ ‘physician’ in an exact sense, and then
again ‘shepherd’ or ‘ruler’ in an inexact,—if the words are strictly taken, the ruler and the
shepherd look only to the good of their people or flocks and not to their own: whereas
you insist that rulers are solely actuated by love of office. ‘No doubt about it,’ replies
Thrasymachus. Then why are they paid? Is not the reason, that their interest is not
comprehended in their art, and is therefore the concern of another art, the art of pay,
which is common to the arts in general, and therefore not identical with any one of
them? Nor would any man be a ruler unless he were induced by the hope of reward or
the fear of punishment;—the reward is money or honour, the punishment is the
necessity of being ruled by a man worse than himself. And if a State (or Church) were
composed entirely of good men, they would be affected by the last motive only; and
there would be as much ‘nolo episcopari’ as there is at present of the opposite...
The satire on existing governments is heightened by the simple and apparently
incidental manner in which the last remark is introduced. There is a similar irony in the
argument that the governors of mankind do not like being in office, and that therefore
they demand pay.
...Enough of this: the other assertion of Thrasymachus is far more important—that the
unjust life is more gainful than the just. Now, as you and I, Glaucon, are not convinced
by him, we must reply to him; but if we try to compare their respective gains we shall
want a judge to decide for us; we had better therefore proceed by making mutual
admissions of the truth to one another.
Thrasymachus had asserted that perfect injustice was more gainful than perfect justice,
and after a little hesitation he is induced by Socrates to admit the still greater paradox
that injustice is virtue and justice vice. Socrates praises his frankness, and assumes the
attitude of one whose only wish is to understand the meaning of his opponents. At the
same time he is weaving a net in which Thrasymachus is finally enclosed. The admission
is elicited from him that the just man seeks to gain an advantage over the unjust only,
but not over the just, while the unjust would gain an advantage over either. Socrates, in
order to test this statement, employs once more the favourite analogy of the arts. The
musician, doctor, skilled artist of any sort, does not seek to gain more than the skilled,
but only more than the unskilled (that is to say, he works up to a rule, standard, law, and
does not exceed it), whereas the unskilled makes random efforts at excess. Thus the
skilled falls on the side of the good, and the unskilled on the side of the evil, and the just
is the skilled, and the unjust is the unskilled.
There was great difficulty in bringing Thrasymachus to the point; the day was hot and he
was streaming with perspiration, and for the first time in his life he was seen to blush.
But his other thesis that injustice was stronger than justice has not yet been refuted, and
Socrates now proceeds to the consideration of this, which, with the assistance of
Thrasymachus, he hopes to clear up; the latter is at first churlish, but in the judicious
hands of Socrates is soon restored to good-humour: Is there not honour among
thieves? Is not the strength of injustice only a remnant of justice? Is not absolute
injustice absolute weakness also? A house that is divided against itself cannot stand; two
men who quarrel detract from one another’s strength, and he who is at war with himself
is the enemy of himself and the gods. Not wickedness therefore, but semi-wickedness
flourishes in states, —a remnant of good is needed in order to make union in action
possible,— there is no kingdom of evil in this world.
Another question has not been answered: Is the just or the unjust the happier? To this
we reply, that every art has an end and an excellence or virtue by which the end is
accomplished. And is not the end of the soul happiness, and justice the excellence of the
soul by which happiness is attained? Justice and happiness being thus shown to be
inseparable, the question whether the just or the unjust is the happier has disappeared.
Thrasymachus replies: ‘Let this be your entertainment, Socrates, at the festival of Bendis.’
Yes; and a very good entertainment with which your kindness has supplied me, now that
you have left off scolding. And yet not a good entertainment—but that was my own
fault, for I tasted of too many things. First of all the nature of justice was the subject of
our enquiry, and then whether justice is virtue and wisdom, or evil and folly; and then
the comparative advantages of just and unjust: and the sum of all is that I know not
what justice is; how then shall I know whether the just is happy or not?...
Thus the sophistical fabric has been demolished, chiefly by appealing to the analogy of
the arts. ‘Justice is like the arts (1) in having no external interest, and (2) in not aiming at
excess, and (3) justice is to happiness what the implement of the workman is to his
work.’ At this the modern reader is apt to stumble, because he forgets that Plato is
writing in an age when the arts and the virtues, like the moral and intellectual faculties,
were still undistinguished. Among early enquirers into the nature of human action the
arts helped to fill up the void of speculation; and at first the comparison of the arts and
the virtues was not perceived by them to be fallacious. They only saw the points of
agreement in them and not the points of difference. Virtue, like art, must take means to
an end; good manners are both an art and a virtue; character is naturally described
under the image of a statue; and there are many other figures of speech which are
readily transferred from art to morals. The next generation cleared up these perplexities;
or at least supplied after ages with a further analysis of them. The contemporaries of
Plato were in a state of transition, and had not yet fully realized the common-sense
distinction of Aristotle, that ‘virtue is concerned with action, art with production’ (Nic.
Eth.), or that ‘virtue implies intention and constancy of purpose,’ whereas ‘art requires
knowledge only’. And yet in the absurdities which follow from some uses of the analogy,
there seems to be an intimation conveyed that virtue is more than art. This is implied in
the reductio ad absurdum that ‘justice is a thief,’ and in the dissatisfaction which
Socrates expresses at the final result.
The expression ‘an art of pay’ which is described as ‘common to all the arts’ is not in
accordance with the ordinary use of language. Nor is it employed elsewhere either by
Plato or by any other Greek writer. It is suggested by the argument, and seems to
extend the conception of art to doing as well as making. Another flaw or inaccuracy of
language may be noted in the words ‘men who are injured are made more unjust.’ For
those who are injured are not necessarily made worse, but only harmed or ill-treated.
The second of the three arguments, ‘that the just does not aim at excess,’ has a real
meaning, though wrapped up in an enigmatical form. That the good is of the nature of
the finite is a peculiarly Hellenic sentiment, which may be compared with the language
of those modern writers who speak of virtue as fitness, and of freedom as obedience to
law. The mathematical or logical notion of limit easily passes into an ethical one, and
even finds a mythological expression in the conception of envy (Greek). Ideas of
measure, equality, order, unity, proportion, still linger in the writings of moralists; and
the true spirit of the fine arts is better conveyed by such terms than by superlatives.
‘When workmen strive to do better than well, They do confound their skill in
covetousness.’ (King John.)
The harmony of the soul and body, and of the parts of the soul with one another, a
harmony ‘fairer than that of musical notes,’ is the true Hellenic mode of conceiving the
perfection of human nature.
In what may be called the epilogue of the discussion with Thrasymachus, Plato argues
that evil is not a principle of strength, but of discord and dissolution, just touching the
question which has been often treated in modern times by theologians and
philosophers, of the negative nature of evil. In the last argument we trace the germ of
the Aristotelian doctrine of an end and a virtue directed towards the end, which again is
suggested by the arts. The final reconcilement of justice and happiness and the identity
of the individual and the State are also intimated. Socrates reassumes the character of a
‘know-nothing;’ at the same time he appears to be not wholly satisfied with the manner
in which the argument has been conducted. Nothing is concluded; but the tendency of
the dialectical process, here as always, is to enlarge our conception of ideas, and to
widen their application to human life.
BOOK II.
Thrasymachus is pacified, but the intrepid Glaucon insists on continuing the argument.
He is not satisfied with the indirect manner in which, at the end of the last book,
Socrates had disposed of the question ‘Whether the just or the unjust is the happier.’ He
begins by dividing goods into three classes:—first, goods desirable in themselves;
secondly, goods desirable in themselves and for their results; thirdly, goods desirable for
their results only. He then asks Socrates in which of the three classes he would place
justice. In the second class, replies Socrates, among goods desirable for themselves and
also for their results. ‘Then the world in general are of another mind, for they say that
justice belongs to the troublesome class of goods which are desirable for their results
only. Socrates answers that this is the doctrine of Thrasymachus which he rejects.
Glaucon thinks that Thrasymachus was too ready to listen to the voice of the charmer,
and proposes to consider the nature of justice and injustice in themselves and apart
from the results and rewards of them which the world is always dinning in his ears. He
will first of all speak of the nature and origin of justice; secondly, of the manner in which
men view justice as a necessity and not a good; and thirdly, he will prove the
reasonableness of this view.
‘To do injustice is said to be a good; to suffer injustice an evil. As the evil is discovered
by experience to be greater than the good, the sufferers, who cannot also be doers,
make a compact that they will have neither, and this compact or mean is called justice,
but is really the impossibility of doing injustice. No one would observe such a compact if
he were not obliged. Let us suppose that the just and unjust have two rings, like that of
Gyges in the well-known story, which make them invisible, and then no difference will
appear in them, for every one will do evil if he can. And he who abstains will be
regarded by the world as a fool for his pains. Men may praise him in public out of fear
for themselves, but they will laugh at him in their hearts (Cp. Gorgias.)
‘And now let us frame an ideal of the just and unjust. Imagine the unjust man to be
master of his craft, seldom making mistakes and easily correcting them; having gifts of
money, speech, strength—the greatest villain bearing the highest character: and at his
side let us place the just in his nobleness and simplicity—being, not seeming—without
name or reward— clothed in his justice only—the best of men who is thought to be the
worst, and let him die as he has lived. I might add (but I would rather put the rest into
the mouth of the panegyrists of injustice—they will tell you) that the just man will be
scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes put out, and will at last be crucified (literally
impaled)—and all this because he ought to have preferred seeming to being. How
different is the case of the unjust who clings to appearance as the true reality! His high
character makes him a ruler; he can marry where he likes, trade where he likes, help his
friends and hurt his enemies; having got rich by dishonesty he can worship the gods
better, and will therefore be more loved by them than the just.’
I was thinking what to answer, when Adeimantus joined in the already unequal fray. He
considered that the most important point of all had been omitted:—‘Men are taught to
be just for the sake of rewards; parents and guardians make reputation the incentive to
virtue. And other advantages are promised by them of a more solid kind, such as
wealthy marriages and high offices. There are the pictures in Homer and Hesiod of fat
sheep and heavy fleeces, rich corn-fields and trees toppling with fruit, which the gods
provide in this life for the just. And the Orphic poets add a similar picture of another.
The heroes of Musaeus and Eumolpus lie on couches at a festival, with garlands on their
heads, enjoying as the meed of virtue a paradise of immortal drunkenness. Some go
further, and speak of a fair posterity in the third and fourth generation. But the wicked
they bury in a slough and make them carry water in a sieve: and in this life they attribute
to them the infamy which Glaucon was assuming to be the lot of the just who are
supposed to be unjust.
‘Take another kind of argument which is found both in poetry and prose:— “Virtue,” as
Hesiod says, “is honourable but difficult, vice is easy and profitable.” You may often see
the wicked in great prosperity and the righteous afflicted by the will of heaven. And
mendicant prophets knock at rich men’s doors, promising to atone for the sins of
themselves or their fathers in an easy fashion with sacrifices and festive games, or with
charms and invocations to get rid of an enemy good or bad by divine help and at a
small charge;—they appeal to books professing to be written by Musaeus and Orpheus,
and carry away the minds of whole cities, and promise to “get souls out of purgatory;”
and if we refuse to listen to them, no one knows what will happen to us.
‘When a lively-minded ingenuous youth hears all this, what will be his conclusion? “Will
he,” in the language of Pindar, “make justice his high tower, or fortify himself with
crooked deceit?” Justice, he reflects, without the appearance of justice, is misery and
ruin; injustice has the promise of a glorious life. Appearance is master of truth and lord
of happiness. To appearance then I will turn,—I will put on the show of virtue and trail
behind me the fox of Archilochus. I hear some one saying that “wickedness is not easily
concealed,” to which I reply that “nothing great is easy.” Union and force and rhetoric
will do much; and if men say that they cannot prevail over the gods, still how do we
know that there are gods? Only from the poets, who acknowledge that they may be
appeased by sacrifices. Then why not sin and pay for indulgences out of your sin? For if
the righteous are only unpunished, still they have no further reward, while the wicked
may be unpunished and have the pleasure of sinning too. But what of the world below?
Nay, says the argument, there are atoning powers who will set that matter right, as the
poets, who are the sons of the gods, tell us; and this is confirmed by the authority of the
State.
‘How can we resist such arguments in favour of injustice? Add good manners, and, as
the wise tell us, we shall make the best of both worlds. Who that is not a miserable
caitiff will refrain from smiling at the praises of justice? Even if a man knows the better
part he will not be angry with others; for he knows also that more than human virtue is
needed to save a man, and that he only praises justice who is incapable of injustice.
‘The origin of the evil is that all men from the beginning, heroes, poets, instructors of
youth, have always asserted “the temporal dispensation,” the honours and profits of
justice. Had we been taught in early youth the power of justice and injustice inherent in
the soul, and unseen by any human or divine eye, we should not have needed others to
be our guardians, but every one would have been the guardian of himself. This is what I
want you to show, Socrates;—other men use arguments which rather tend to strengthen
the position of Thrasymachus that “might is right;” but from you I expect better things.
And please, as Glaucon said, to exclude reputation; let the just be thought unjust and
the unjust just, and do you still prove to us the superiority of justice’...
The thesis, which for the sake of argument has been maintained by Glaucon, is the
converse of that of Thrasymachus—not right is the interest of the stronger, but right is
the necessity of the weaker. Starting from the same premises he carries the analysis of
society a step further back;—might is still right, but the might is the weakness of the
many combined against the strength of the few.
There have been theories in modern as well as in ancient times which have a family
likeness to the speculations of Glaucon; e.g. that power is the foundation of right; or
that a monarch has a divine right to govern well or ill; or that virtue is self-love or the
love of power; or that war is the natural state of man; or that private vices are public
benefits. All such theories have a kind of plausibility from their partial agreement with
experience. For human nature oscillates between good and evil, and the motives of
actions and the origin of institutions may be explained to a certain extent on either
hypothesis according to the character or point of view of a particular thinker. The
obligation of maintaining authority under all circumstances and sometimes by rather
questionable means is felt strongly and has become a sort of instinct among civilized
men. The divine right of kings, or more generally of governments, is one of the forms
under which this natural feeling is expressed. Nor again is there any evil which has not
some accompaniment of good or pleasure; nor any good which is free from some alloy
of evil; nor any noble or generous thought which may not be attended by a shadow or
the ghost of a shadow of self-interest or of self-love. We know that all human actions
are imperfect; but we do not therefore attribute them to the worse rather than to the
better motive or principle. Such a philosophy is both foolish and false, like that opinion
of the clever rogue who assumes all other men to be like himself. And theories of this
sort do not represent the real nature of the State, which is based on a vague sense of
right gradually corrected and enlarged by custom and law (although capable also of
perversion), any more than they describe the origin of society, which is to be sought in
the family and in the social and religious feelings of man. Nor do they represent the
average character of individuals, which cannot be explained simply on a theory of evil,
but has always a counteracting element of good. And as men become better such
theories appear more and more untruthful to them, because they are more conscious of
their own disinterestedness. A little experience may make a man a cynic; a great deal will
bring him back to a truer and kindlier view of the mixed nature of himself and his fellow
men.
The two brothers ask Socrates to prove to them that the just is happy when they have
taken from him all that in which happiness is ordinarily supposed to consist. Not that
there is (1) any absurdity in the attempt to frame a notion of justice apart from
circumstances. For the ideal must always be a paradox when compared with the
ordinary conditions of human life. Neither the Stoical ideal nor the Christian ideal is true
as a fact, but they may serve as a basis of education, and may exercise an ennobling
influence. An ideal is none the worse because ‘some one has made the discovery’ that
no such ideal was ever realized. And in a few exceptional individuals who are raised
above the ordinary level of humanity, the ideal of happiness may be realized in death
and misery. This may be the state which the reason deliberately approves, and which the
utilitarian as well as every other moralist may be bound in certain cases to prefer.
Nor again, (2) must we forget that Plato, though he agrees generally with the view
implied in the argument of the two brothers, is not expressing his own final conclusion,
but rather seeking to dramatize one of the aspects of ethical truth. He is developing his
idea gradually in a series of positions or situations. He is exhibiting Socrates for the first
time undergoing the Socratic interrogation. Lastly, (3) the word ‘happiness’ involves
some degree of confusion because associated in the language of modern philosophy
with conscious pleasure or satisfaction, which was not equally present to his mind.
Glaucon has been drawing a picture of the misery of the just and the happiness of the
unjust, to which the misery of the tyrant in Book IX is the answer and parallel. And still
the unjust must appear just; that is ‘the homage which vice pays to virtue.’ But now
Adeimantus, taking up the hint which had been already given by Glaucon, proceeds to
show that in the opinion of mankind justice is regarded only for the sake of rewards and
reputation, and points out the advantage which is given to such arguments as those of
Thrasymachus and Glaucon by the conventional morality of mankind. He seems to feel
the difficulty of ‘justifying the ways of God to man.’ Both the brothers touch upon the
question, whether the morality of actions is determined by their consequences; and
both of them go beyond the position of Socrates, that justice belongs to the class of
goods not desirable for themselves only, but desirable for themselves and for their
results, to which he recalls them. In their attempt to view justice as an internal principle,
and in their condemnation of the poets, they anticipate him. The common life of Greece
is not enough for them; they must penetrate deeper into the nature of things.
It has been objected that justice is honesty in the sense of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but
is taken by Socrates to mean all virtue. May we not more truly say that the oldfashioned
notion of justice is enlarged by Socrates, and becomes equivalent to universal
order or well-being, first in the State, and secondly in the individual? He has found a
new answer to his old question (Protag.), ‘whether the virtues are one or many,’ viz. that
one is the ordering principle of the three others. In seeking to establish the purely
internal nature of justice, he is met by the fact that man is a social being, and he tries to
harmonise the two opposite theses as well as he can. There is no more inconsistency in
this than was inevitable in his age and country; there is no use in turning upon him the
cross lights of modern philosophy, which, from some other point of view, would appear
equally inconsistent. Plato does not give the final solution of philosophical questions for
us; nor can he be judged of by our standard.
The remainder of the Republic is developed out of the question of the sons of Ariston.
Three points are deserving of remark in what immediately follows:—First, that the
answer of Socrates is altogether indirect. He does not say that happiness consists in the
contemplation of the idea of justice, and still less will he be tempted to affirm the Stoical
paradox that the just man can be happy on the rack. But first he dwells on the difficulty
of the problem and insists on restoring man to his natural condition, before he will
answer the question at all. He too will frame an ideal, but his ideal comprehends not
only abstract justice, but the whole relations of man. Under the fanciful illustration of the
large letters he implies that he will only look for justice in society, and that from the
State he will proceed to the individual. His answer in substance amounts to this,—that
under favourable conditions, i.e. in the perfect State, justice and happiness will coincide,
and that when justice has been once found, happiness may be left to take care of itself.
That he falls into some degree of inconsistency, when in the tenth book he claims to
have got rid of the rewards and honours of justice, may be admitted; for he has left
those which exist in the perfect State. And the philosopher ‘who retires under the shelter
of a wall’ can hardly have been esteemed happy by him, at least not in this world. Still he
maintains the true attitude of moral action. Let a man do his duty first, without asking
whether he will be happy or not, and happiness will be the inseparable accident which
attends him. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these
things shall be added unto you.’
Secondly, it may be remarked that Plato preserves the genuine character of Greek
thought in beginning with the State and in going on to the individual. First ethics, then
politics—this is the order of ideas to us; the reverse is the order of history. Only after
many struggles of thought does the individual assert his right as a moral being. In early
ages he is not ONE, but one of many, the citizen of a State which is prior to him; and he
has no notion of good or evil apart from the law of his country or the creed of his
church. And to this type he is constantly tending to revert, whenever the influence of
custom, or of party spirit, or the recollection of the past becomes too strong for him.
Thirdly, we may observe the confusion or identification of the individual and the State,
of ethics and politics, which pervades early Greek speculation, and even in modern times
retains a certain degree of influence. The subtle difference between the collective and
individual action of mankind seems to have escaped early thinkers, and we too are
sometimes in danger of forgetting the conditions of united human action, whenever we
either elevate politics into ethics, or lower ethics to the standard of politics. The good
man and the good citizen only coincide in the perfect State; and this perfection cannot
be attained by legislation acting upon them from without, but, if at all, by education
fashioning them from within.
...Socrates praises the sons of Ariston, ‘inspired offspring of the renowned hero,’ as the
elegiac poet terms them; but he does not understand how they can argue so eloquently
on behalf of injustice while their character shows that they are uninfluenced by their
own arguments. He knows not how to answer them, although he is afraid of deserting
justice in the hour of need. He therefore makes a condition, that having weak eyes he
shall be allowed to read the large letters first and then go on to the smaller, that is, he
must look for justice in the State first, and will then proceed to the individual.
Accordingly he begins to construct the State.
Society arises out of the wants of man. His first want is food; his second a house; his
third a coat. The sense of these needs and the possibility of satisfying them by
exchange, draw individuals together on the same spot; and this is the beginning of a
State, which we take the liberty to invent, although necessity is the real inventor. There
must be first a husbandman, secondly a builder, thirdly a weaver, to which may be
added a cobbler. Four or five citizens at least are required to make a city. Now men have
different natures, and one man will do one thing better than many; and business waits
for no man. Hence there must be a division of labour into different employments; into
wholesale and retail trade; into workers, and makers of workmen’s tools; into shepherds
and husbandmen. A city which includes all this will have far exceeded the limit of four or
five, and yet not be very large. But then again imports will be required, and imports
necessitate exports, and this implies variety of produce in order to attract the taste of
purchasers; also merchants and ships. In the city too we must have a market and money
and retail trades; otherwise buyers and sellers will never meet, and the valuable time of
the producers will be wasted in vain efforts at exchange. If we add hired servants the
State will be complete. And we may guess that somewhere in the intercourse of the
citizens with one another justice and injustice will appear.
Here follows a rustic picture of their way of life. They spend their days in houses which
they have built for themselves; they make their own clothes and produce their own corn
and wine. Their principal food is meal and flour, and they drink in moderation. They live
on the best of terms with each other, and take care not to have too many children. ‘But,’
said Glaucon, interposing, ‘are they not to have a relish?’ Certainly; they will have salt
and olives and cheese, vegetables and fruits, and chestnuts to roast at the fire. ‘’Tis a city
of pigs, Socrates.’ Why, I replied, what do you want more? ‘Only the comforts of life,—
sofas and tables, also sauces and sweets.’ I see; you want not only a State, but a
luxurious State; and possibly in the more complex frame we may sooner find justice and
injustice. Then the fine arts must go to work—every conceivable instrument and
ornament of luxury will be wanted. There will be dancers, painters, sculptors, musicians,
cooks, barbers, tire-women, nurses, artists; swineherds and neatherds too for the
animals, and physicians to cure the disorders of which luxury is the source. To feed all
these superfluous mouths we shall need a part of our neighbour’s land, and they will
want a part of ours. And this is the origin of war, which may be traced to the same
causes as other political evils. Our city will now require the slight addition of a camp,
and the citizen will be converted into a soldier. But then again our old doctrine of the
division of labour must not be forgotten. The art of war cannot be learned in a day, and
there must be a natural aptitude for military duties. There will be some warlike natures
who have this aptitude—dogs keen of scent, swift of foot to pursue, and strong of limb
to fight. And as spirit is the foundation of courage, such natures, whether of men or
animals, will be full of spirit. But these spirited natures are apt to bite and devour one
another; the union of gentleness to friends and fierceness against enemies appears to
be an impossibility, and the guardian of a State requires both qualities. Who then can be
a guardian? The image of the dog suggests an answer. For dogs are gentle to friends
and fierce to strangers. Your dog is a philosopher who judges by the rule of knowing or
not knowing; and philosophy, whether in man or beast, is the parent of gentleness. The
human watchdogs must be philosophers or lovers of learning which will make them
gentle. And how are they to be learned without education?
But what shall their education be? Is any better than the old-fashioned sort which is
comprehended under the name of music and gymnastic? Music includes literature, and
literature is of two kinds, true and false. ‘What do you mean?’ he said. I mean that
children hear stories before they learn gymnastics, and that the stories are either untrue,
or have at most one or two grains of truth in a bushel of falsehood. Now early life is very
impressible, and children ought not to learn what they will have to unlearn when they
grow up; we must therefore have a censorship of nursery tales, banishing some and
keeping others. Some of them are very improper, as we may see in the great instances
of Homer and Hesiod, who not only tell lies but bad lies; stories about Uranus and
Saturn, which are immoral as well as false, and which should never be spoken of to
young persons, or indeed at all; or, if at all, then in a mystery, after the sacrifice, not of
an Eleusinian pig, but of some unprocurable animal. Shall our youth be encouraged to
beat their fathers by the example of Zeus, or our citizens be incited to quarrel by
hearing or seeing representations of strife among the gods? Shall they listen to the
narrative of Hephaestus binding his mother, and of Zeus sending him flying for helping
her when she was beaten? Such tales may possibly have a mystical interpretation, but
the young are incapable of understanding allegory. If any one asks what tales are to be
allowed, we will answer that we are legislators and not book-makers; we only lay down
the principles according to which books are to be written; to write them is the duty of
others.
And our first principle is, that God must be represented as he is; not as the author of all
things, but of good only. We will not suffer the poets to say that he is the steward of
good and evil, or that he has two casks full of destinies;—or that Athene and Zeus
incited Pandarus to break the treaty; or that God caused the sufferings of Niobe, or of
Pelops, or the Trojan war; or that he makes men sin when he wishes to destroy them.
Either these were not the actions of the gods, or God was just, and men were the better
for being punished. But that the deed was evil, and God the author, is a wicked, suicidal
fiction which we will allow no one, old or young, to utter. This is our first and great
principle—God is the author of good only.
And the second principle is like unto it:—With God is no variableness or change of form.
Reason teaches us this; for if we suppose a change in God, he must be changed either
by another or by himself. By another?—but the best works of nature and art and the
noblest qualities of mind are least liable to be changed by any external force. By
himself?—but he cannot change for the better; he will hardly change for the worse. He
remains for ever fairest and best in his own image. Therefore we refuse to listen to the
poets who tell us of Here begging in the likeness of a priestess or of other deities who
prowl about at night in strange disguises; all that blasphemous nonsense with which
mothers fool the manhood out of their children must be suppressed. But some one will
say that God, who is himself unchangeable, may take a form in relation to us. Why
should he? For gods as well as men hate the lie in the soul, or principle of falsehood;
and as for any other form of lying which is used for a purpose and is regarded as
innocent in certain exceptional cases—what need have the gods of this? For they are
not ignorant of antiquity like the poets, nor are they afraid of their enemies, nor is any
madman a friend of theirs. God then is true, he is absolutely true; he changes not, he
deceives not, by day or night, by word or sign. This is our second great principle—God is
true. Away with the lying dream of Agamemnon in Homer, and the accusation of Thetis
against Apollo in Aeschylus...
In order to give clearness to his conception of the State, Plato proceeds to trace the first
principles of mutual need and of division of labour in an imaginary community of four
or five citizens. Gradually this community increases; the division of labour extends to
countries; imports necessitate exports; a medium of exchange is required, and retailers
sit in the market-place to save the time of the producers. These are the steps by which
Plato constructs the first or primitive State, introducing the elements of political
economy by the way. As he is going to frame a second or civilized State, the simple
naturally comes before the complex. He indulges, like Rousseau, in a picture of primitive
life—an idea which has indeed often had a powerful influence on the imagination of
mankind, but he does not seriously mean to say that one is better than the other
(Politicus); nor can any inference be drawn from the description of the first state taken
apart from the second, such as Aristotle appears to draw in the Politics. We should not
interpret a Platonic dialogue any more than a poem or a parable in too literal or matterof-fact
a style. On the other hand, when we compare the lively fancy of Plato with the
dried-up abstractions of modern treatises on philosophy, we are compelled to say with
Protagoras, that the ‘mythus is more interesting’ (Protag.)
Several interesting remarks which in modern times would have a place in a treatise on
Political Economy are scattered up and down the writings of Plato: especially Laws,
Population; Free Trade; Adulteration; Wills and Bequests; Begging; Eryxias, (though not
Plato’s), Value and Demand; Republic, Division of Labour. The last subject, and also the
origin of Retail Trade, is treated with admirable lucidity in the second book of the
Republic. But Plato never combined his economic ideas into a system, and never seems
to have recognized that Trade is one of the great motive powers of the State and of the
world. He would make retail traders only of the inferior sort of citizens (Rep., Laws),
though he remarks, quaintly enough (Laws), that ‘if only the best men and the best
women everywhere were compelled to keep taverns for a time or to carry on retail trade,
etc., then we should knew how pleasant and agreeable all these things are.’
The disappointment of Glaucon at the ‘city of pigs,’ the ludicrous description of the
ministers of luxury in the more refined State, and the afterthought of the necessity of
doctors, the illustration of the nature of the guardian taken from the dog, the
desirableness of offering some almost unprocurable victim when impure mysteries are
to be celebrated, the behaviour of Zeus to his father and of Hephaestus to his mother,
are touches of humour which have also a serious meaning. In speaking of education
Plato rather startles us by affirming that a child must be trained in falsehood first and in
truth afterwards. Yet this is not very different from saying that children must be taught
through the medium of imagination as well as reason; that their minds can only
develope gradually, and that there is much which they must learn without
understanding. This is also the substance of Plato’s view, though he must be
acknowledged to have drawn the line somewhat differently from modern ethical writers,
respecting truth and falsehood. To us, economies or accommodations would not be
allowable unless they were required by the human faculties or necessary for the
communication of knowledge to the simple and ignorant. We should insist that the
word was inseparable from the intention, and that we must not be ‘falsely true,’ i.e.
speak or act falsely in support of what was right or true. But Plato would limit the use of
fictions only by requiring that they should have a good moral effect, and that such a
dangerous weapon as falsehood should be employed by the rulers alone and for great
objects.
A Greek in the age of Plato attached no importance to the question whether his religion
was an historical fact. He was just beginning to be conscious that the past had a history;
but he could see nothing beyond Homer and Hesiod. Whether their narratives were true
or false did not seriously affect the political or social life of Hellas. Men only began to
suspect that they were fictions when they recognised them to be immoral. And so in all
religions: the consideration of their morality comes first, afterwards the truth of the
documents in which they are recorded, or of the events natural or supernatural which
are told of them. But in modern times, and in Protestant countries perhaps more than in
Catholic, we have been too much inclined to identify the historical with the moral; and
some have refused to believe in religion at all, unless a superhuman accuracy was
discernible in every part of the record. The facts of an ancient or religious history are
amongst the most important of all facts; but they are frequently uncertain, and we only
learn the true lesson which is to be gathered from them when we place ourselves above
them. These reflections tend to show that the difference between Plato and ourselves,
though not unimportant, is not so great as might at first sight appear. For we should
agree with him in placing the moral before the historical truth of religion; and, generally,
in disregarding those errors or misstatements of fact which necessarily occur in the early
stages of all religions. We know also that changes in the traditions of a country cannot
be made in a day; and are therefore tolerant of many things which science and criticism
would condemn.
We note in passing that the allegorical interpretation of mythology, said to have been
first introduced as early as the sixth century before Christ by Theagenes of Rhegium, was
well established in the age of Plato, and here, as in the Phaedrus, though for a different
reason, was rejected by him. That anachronisms whether of religion or law, when men
have reached another stage of civilization, should be got rid of by fictions is in
accordance with universal experience. Great is the art of interpretation; and by a natural
process, which when once discovered was always going on, what could not be altered
was explained away. And so without any palpable inconsistency there existed side by
side two forms of religion, the tradition inherited or invented by the poets and the
customary worship of the temple; on the other hand, there was the religion of the
philosopher, who was dwelling in the heaven of ideas, but did not therefore refuse to
offer a cock to Aesculapius, or to be seen saying his prayers at the rising of the sun. At
length the antagonism between the popular and philosophical religion, never so great
among the Greeks as in our own age, disappeared, and was only felt like the difference
between the religion of the educated and uneducated among ourselves. The Zeus of
Homer and Hesiod easily passed into the ‘royal mind’ of Plato (Philebus); the giant
Heracles became the knight-errant and benefactor of mankind. These and still more
wonderful transformations were readily effected by the ingenuity of Stoics and neoPlatonists
in the two or three centuries before and after Christ. The Greek and Roman
religions were gradually permeated by the spirit of philosophy; having lost their ancient
meaning, they were resolved into poetry and morality; and probably were never purer
than at the time of their decay, when their influence over the world was waning.
A singular conception which occurs towards the end of the book is the lie in the soul;
this is connected with the Platonic and Socratic doctrine that involuntary ignorance is
worse than voluntary. The lie in the soul is a true lie, the corruption of the highest truth,
the deception of the highest part of the soul, from which he who is deceived has no
power of delivering himself. For example, to represent God as false or immoral, or,
according to Plato, as deluding men with appearances or as the author of evil; or again,
to affirm with Protagoras that ‘knowledge is sensation,’ or that ‘being is becoming,’ or
with Thrasymachus ‘that might is right,’ would have been regarded by Plato as a lie of
this hateful sort. The greatest unconsciousness of the greatest untruth, e.g. if, in the
language of the Gospels (John), ‘he who was blind’ were to say ‘I see,’ is another aspect
of the state of mind which Plato is describing. The lie in the soul may be further
compared with the sin against the Holy Ghost (Luke), allowing for the difference
between Greek and Christian modes of speaking. To this is opposed the lie in words,
which is only such a deception as may occur in a play or poem, or allegory or figure of
speech, or in any sort of accommodation,—which though useless to the gods may be
useful to men in certain cases. Socrates is here answering the question which he had
himself raised about the propriety of deceiving a madman; and he is also contrasting
the nature of God and man. For God is Truth, but mankind can only be true by
appearing sometimes to be partial, or false. Reserving for another place the greater
questions of religion or education, we may note further, (1) the approval of the old
traditional education of Greece; (2) the preparation which Plato is making for the attack
on Homer and the poets; (3) the preparation which he is also making for the use of
economies in the State; (4) the contemptuous and at the same time euphemistic manner
in which here as below he alludes to the ‘Chronique Scandaleuse’ of the gods.
BOOK III.
There is another motive in purifying religion, which is to banish fear; for no man can be
courageous who is afraid of death, or who believes the tales which are repeated by the
poets concerning the world below. They must be gently requested not to abuse hell;
they may be reminded that their stories are both untrue and discouraging. Nor must
they be angry if we expunge obnoxious passages, such as the depressing words of
Achilles—‘I would rather be a serving-man than rule over all the dead;’ and the verses
which tell of the squalid mansions, the senseless shadows, the flitting soul mourning
over lost strength and youth, the soul with a gibber going beneath the earth like smoke,
or the souls of the suitors which flutter about like bats. The terrors and horrors of
Cocytus and Styx, ghosts and sapless shades, and the rest of their Tartarean
nomenclature, must vanish. Such tales may have their use; but they are not the proper
food for soldiers. As little can we admit the sorrows and sympathies of the Homeric
heroes:—Achilles, the son of Thetis, in tears, throwing ashes on his head, or pacing up
and down the sea-shore in distraction; or Priam, the cousin of the gods, crying aloud,
rolling in the mire. A good man is not prostrated at the loss of children or fortune.
Neither is death terrible to him; and therefore lamentations over the dead should not be
practised by men of note; they should be the concern of inferior persons only, whether
women or men. Still worse is the attribution of such weakness to the gods; as when the
goddesses say, ‘Alas! my travail!’ and worst of all, when the king of heaven himself
laments his inability to save Hector, or sorrows over the impending doom of his dear
Sarpedon. Such a character of God, if not ridiculed by our young men, is likely to be
imitated by them. Nor should our citizens be given to excess of laughter—‘Such violent
delights’ are followed by a violent re-action. The description in the Iliad of the gods
shaking their sides at the clumsiness of Hephaestus will not be admitted by us. ‘Certainly
not.’
Truth should have a high place among the virtues, for falsehood, as we were saying, is
useless to the gods, and only useful to men as a medicine. But this employment of
falsehood must remain a privilege of state; the common man must not in return tell a lie
to the ruler; any more than the patient would tell a lie to his physician, or the sailor to
his captain.
In the next place our youth must be temperate, and temperance consists in self-control
and obedience to authority. That is a lesson which Homer teaches in some places: ‘The
Achaeans marched on breathing prowess, in silent awe of their leaders;’—but a very
different one in other places: ‘O heavy with wine, who hast the eyes of a dog, but the
heart of a stag.’ Language of the latter kind will not impress self-control on the minds of
youth. The same may be said about his praises of eating and drinking and his dread of
starvation; also about the verses in which he tells of the rapturous loves of Zeus and
Here, or of how Hephaestus once detained Ares and Aphrodite in a net on a similar
occasion. There is a nobler strain heard in the words:—‘Endure, my soul, thou hast
endured worse.’ Nor must we allow our citizens to receive bribes, or to say, ‘Gifts
persuade the gods, gifts reverend kings;’ or to applaud the ignoble advice of Phoenix to
Achilles that he should get money out of the Greeks before he assisted them; or the
meanness of Achilles himself in taking gifts from Agamemnon; or his requiring a ransom
for the body of Hector; or his cursing of Apollo; or his insolence to the river-god
Scamander; or his dedication to the dead Patroclus of his own hair which had been
already dedicated to the other river-god Spercheius; or his cruelty in dragging the body
of Hector round the walls, and slaying the captives at the pyre: such a combination of
meanness and cruelty in Cheiron’s pupil is inconceivable. The amatory exploits of
Peirithous and Theseus are equally unworthy. Either these so-called sons of gods were
not the sons of gods, or they were not such as the poets imagine them, any more than
the gods themselves are the authors of evil. The youth who believes that such things are
done by those who have the blood of heaven flowing in their veins will be too ready to
imitate their example.
Enough of gods and heroes;—what shall we say about men? What the poets and storytellers
say—that the wicked prosper and the righteous are afflicted, or that justice is
another’s gain? Such misrepresentations cannot be allowed by us. But in this we are
anticipating the definition of justice, and had therefore better defer the enquiry.
The subjects of poetry have been sufficiently treated; next follows style. Now all poetry is
a narrative of events past, present, or to come; and narrative is of three kinds, the
simple, the imitative, and a composition of the two. An instance will make my meaning
clear. The first scene in Homer is of the last or mixed kind, being partly description and
partly dialogue. But if you throw the dialogue into the ‘oratio obliqua,’ the passage will
run thus: The priest came and prayed Apollo that the Achaeans might take Troy and
have a safe return if Agamemnon would only give him back his daughter; and the other
Greeks assented, but Agamemnon was wroth, and so on—The whole then becomes
descriptive, and the poet is the only speaker left; or, if you omit the narrative, the whole
becomes dialogue. These are the three styles—which of them is to be admitted into our
State? ‘Do you ask whether tragedy and comedy are to be admitted?’ Yes, but also
something more—Is it not doubtful whether our guardians are to be imitators at all? Or
rather, has not the question been already answered, for we have decided that one man
cannot in his life play many parts, any more than he can act both tragedy and comedy,
or be rhapsodist and actor at once? Human nature is coined into very small pieces, and
as our guardians have their own business already, which is the care of freedom, they will
have enough to do without imitating. If they imitate they should imitate, not any
meanness or baseness, but the good only; for the mask which the actor wears is apt to
become his face. We cannot allow men to play the parts of women, quarrelling,
weeping, scolding, or boasting against the gods,—least of all when making love or in
labour. They must not represent slaves, or bullies, or cowards, drunkards, or madmen, or
blacksmiths, or neighing horses, or bellowing bulls, or sounding rivers, or a raging sea. A
good or wise man will be willing to perform good and wise actions, but he will be
ashamed to play an inferior part which he has never practised; and he will prefer to
employ the descriptive style with as little imitation as possible. The man who has no selfrespect,
on the contrary, will imitate anybody and anything; sounds of nature and cries
of animals alike; his whole performance will be imitation of gesture and voice. Now in
the descriptive style there are few changes, but in the dramatic there are a great many.
Poets and musicians use either, or a compound of both, and this compound is very
attractive to youth and their teachers as well as to the vulgar. But our State in which one
man plays one part only is not adapted for complexity. And when one of these
polyphonous pantomimic gentlemen offers to exhibit himself and his poetry we will
show him every observance of respect, but at the same time tell him that there is no
room for his kind in our State; we prefer the rough, honest poet, and will not depart
from our original models (Laws).
Next as to the music. A song or ode has three parts,—the subject, the harmony, and the
rhythm; of which the two last are dependent upon the first. As we banished strains of
lamentation, so we may now banish the mixed Lydian harmonies, which are the
harmonies of lamentation; and as our citizens are to be temperate, we may also banish
convivial harmonies, such as the Ionian and pure Lydian. Two remain—the Dorian and
Phrygian, the first for war, the second for peace; the one expressive of courage, the
other of obedience or instruction or religious feeling. And as we reject varieties of
harmony, we shall also reject the many-stringed, variously-shaped instruments which
give utterance to them, and in particular the flute, which is more complex than any of
them. The lyre and the harp may be permitted in the town, and the Pan’s-pipe in the
fields. Thus we have made a purgation of music, and will now make a purgation of
metres. These should be like the harmonies, simple and suitable to the occasion. There
are four notes of the tetrachord, and there are three ratios of metre, 3/2, 2/2, 2/1, which
have all their characteristics, and the feet have different characteristics as well as the
rhythms. But about this you and I must ask Damon, the great musician, who speaks, if I
remember rightly, of a martial measure as well as of dactylic, trochaic, and iambic
rhythms, which he arranges so as to equalize the syllables with one another, assigning to
each the proper quantity. We only venture to affirm the general principle that the style
is to conform to the subject and the metre to the style; and that the simplicity and
harmony of the soul should be reflected in them all. This principle of simplicity has to be
learnt by every one in the days of his youth, and may be gathered anywhere, from the
creative and constructive arts, as well as from the forms of plants and animals.
Other artists as well as poets should be warned against meanness or unseemliness.
Sculpture and painting equally with music must conform to the law of simplicity. He who
violates it cannot be allowed to work in our city, and to corrupt the taste of our citizens.
For our guardians must grow up, not amid images of deformity which will gradually
poison and corrupt their souls, but in a land of health and beauty where they will drink
in from every object sweet and harmonious influences. And of all these influences the
greatest is the education given by music, which finds a way into the innermost soul and
imparts to it the sense of beauty and of deformity. At first the effect is unconscious; but
when reason arrives, then he who has been thus trained welcomes her as the friend
whom he always knew. As in learning to read, first we acquire the elements or letters
separately, and afterwards their combinations, and cannot recognize reflections of them
until we know the letters themselves;—in like manner we must first attain the elements
or essential forms of the virtues, and then trace their combinations in life and
experience. There is a music of the soul which answers to the harmony of the world; and
the fairest object of a musical soul is the fair mind in the fair body. Some defect in the
latter may be excused, but not in the former. True love is the daughter of temperance,
and temperance is utterly opposed to the madness of bodily pleasure. Enough has been
said of music, which makes a fair ending with love.
Next we pass on to gymnastics; about which I would remark, that the soul is related to
the body as a cause to an effect, and therefore if we educate the mind we may leave the
education of the body in her charge, and need only give a general outline of the course
to be pursued. In the first place the guardians must abstain from strong drink, for they
should be the last persons to lose their wits. Whether the habits of the palaestra are
suitable to them is more doubtful, for the ordinary gymnastic is a sleepy sort of thing,
and if left off suddenly is apt to endanger health. But our warrior athletes must be wide-
awake dogs, and must also be inured to all changes of food and climate. Hence they will
require a simpler kind of gymnastic, akin to their simple music; and for their diet a rule
may be found in Homer, who feeds his heroes on roast meat only, and gives them no
fish although they are living at the sea-side, nor boiled meats which involve an
apparatus of pots and pans; and, if I am not mistaken, he nowhere mentions sweet
sauces. Sicilian cookery and Attic confections and Corinthian courtezans, which are to
gymnastic what Lydian and Ionian melodies are to music, must be forbidden. Where
gluttony and intemperance prevail the town quickly fills with doctors and pleaders; and
law and medicine give themselves airs as soon as the freemen of a State take an interest
in them. But what can show a more disgraceful state of education than to have to go
abroad for justice because you have none of your own at home? And yet there IS a
worse stage of the same disease—when men have learned to take a pleasure and pride
in the twists and turns of the law; not considering how much better it would be for them
so to order their lives as to have no need of a nodding justice. And there is a like
disgrace in employing a physician, not for the cure of wounds or epidemic disorders, but
because a man has by laziness and luxury contracted diseases which were unknown in
the days of Asclepius. How simple is the Homeric practice of medicine. Eurypylus after
he has been wounded drinks a posset of Pramnian wine, which is of a heating nature;
and yet the sons of Asclepius blame neither the damsel who gives him the drink, nor
Patroclus who is attending on him. The truth is that this modern system of nursing
diseases was introduced by Herodicus the trainer; who, being of a sickly constitution, by
a compound of training and medicine tortured first himself and then a good many other
people, and lived a great deal longer than he had any right. But Asclepius would not
practise this art, because he knew that the citizens of a well-ordered State have no
leisure to be ill, and therefore he adopted the ‘kill or cure’ method, which artisans and
labourers employ. ‘They must be at their business,’ they say, ‘and have no time for
coddling: if they recover, well; if they don’t, there is an end of them.’ Whereas the rich
man is supposed to be a gentleman who can afford to be ill. Do you know a maxim of
Phocylides—that ‘when a man begins to be rich’ (or, perhaps, a little sooner) ‘he should
practise virtue’? But how can excessive care of health be inconsistent with an ordinary
occupation, and yet consistent with that practice of virtue which Phocylides inculcates?
When a student imagines that philosophy gives him a headache, he never does
anything; he is always unwell. This was the reason why Asclepius and his sons practised
no such art. They were acting in the interest of the public, and did not wish to preserve
useless lives, or raise up a puny offspring to wretched sires. Honest diseases they
honestly cured; and if a man was wounded, they applied the proper remedies, and then
let him eat and drink what he liked. But they declined to treat intemperate and worthless
subjects, even though they might have made large fortunes out of them. As to the story
of Pindar, that Asclepius was slain by a thunderbolt for restoring a rich man to life, that
is a lie—following our old rule we must say either that he did not take bribes, or that he
was not the son of a god.
Glaucon then asks Socrates whether the best physicians and the best judges will not be
those who have had severally the greatest experience of diseases and of crimes.
Socrates draws a distinction between the two professions. The physician should have
had experience of disease in his own body, for he cures with his mind and not with his
body. But the judge controls mind by mind; and therefore his mind should not be
corrupted by crime. Where then is he to gain experience? How is he to be wise and also
innocent? When young a good man is apt to be deceived by evil-doers, because he has
no pattern of evil in himself; and therefore the judge should be of a certain age; his
youth should have been innocent, and he should have acquired insight into evil not by
the practice of it, but by the observation of it in others. This is the ideal of a judge; the
criminal turned detective is wonderfully suspicious, but when in company with good
men who have experience, he is at fault, for he foolishly imagines that every one is as
bad as himself. Vice may be known of virtue, but cannot know virtue. This is the sort of
medicine and this the sort of law which will prevail in our State; they will be healing arts
to better natures; but the evil body will be left to die by the one, and the evil soul will be
put to death by the other. And the need of either will be greatly diminished by good
music which will give harmony to the soul, and good gymnastic which will give health to
the body. Not that this division of music and gymnastic really corresponds to soul and
body; for they are both equally concerned with the soul, which is tamed by the one and
aroused and sustained by the other. The two together supply our guardians with their
twofold nature. The passionate disposition when it has too much gymnastic is hardened
and brutalized, the gentle or philosophic temper which has too much music becomes
enervated. While a man is allowing music to pour like water through the funnel of his
ears, the edge of his soul gradually wears away, and the passionate or spirited element
is melted out of him. Too little spirit is easily exhausted; too much quickly passes into
nervous irritability. So, again, the athlete by feeding and training has his courage
doubled, but he soon grows stupid; he is like a wild beast, ready to do everything by
blows and nothing by counsel or policy. There are two principles in man, reason and
passion, and to these, not to the soul and body, the two arts of music and gymnastic
correspond. He who mingles them in harmonious concord is the true musician,—he
shall be the presiding genius of our State.
The next question is, Who are to be our rulers? First, the elder must rule the younger;
and the best of the elders will be the best guardians. Now they will be the best who love
their subjects most, and think that they have a common interest with them in the
welfare of the state. These we must select; but they must be watched at every epoch of
life to see whether they have retained the same opinions and held out against force and
enchantment. For time and persuasion and the love of pleasure may enchant a man into
a change of purpose, and the force of grief and pain may compel him. And therefore
our guardians must be men who have been tried by many tests, like gold in the refiner’s
fire, and have been passed first through danger, then through pleasure, and at every
age have come out of such trials victorious and without stain, in full command of
themselves and their principles; having all their faculties in harmonious exercise for their
country’s good. These shall receive the highest honours both in life and death. (It would
perhaps be better to confine the term ‘guardians’ to this select class: the younger men
may be called ‘auxiliaries.’)
And now for one magnificent lie, in the belief of which, Oh that we could train our
rulers!—at any rate let us make the attempt with the rest of the world. What I am going
to tell is only another version of the legend of Cadmus; but our unbelieving generation
will be slow to accept such a story. The tale must be imparted, first to the rulers, then to
the soldiers, lastly to the people. We will inform them that their youth was a dream, and
that during the time when they seemed to be undergoing their education they were
really being fashioned in the earth, who sent them up when they were ready; and that
they must protect and cherish her whose children they are, and regard each other as
brothers and sisters. ‘I do not wonder at your being ashamed to propound such a
fiction.’ There is more behind. These brothers and sisters have different natures, and
some of them God framed to rule, whom he fashioned of gold; others he made of silver,
to be auxiliaries; others again to be husbandmen and craftsmen, and these were formed
by him of brass and iron. But as they are all sprung from a common stock, a golden
parent may have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son, and then there must be a
change of rank; the son of the rich must descend, and the child of the artisan rise, in the
social scale; for an oracle says ‘that the State will come to an end if governed by a man
of brass or iron.’ Will our citizens ever believe all this? ‘Not in the present generation,
but in the next, perhaps, Yes.’
Now let the earthborn men go forth under the command of their rulers, and look about
and pitch their camp in a high place, which will be safe against enemies from without,
and likewise against insurrections from within. There let them sacrifice and set up their
tents; for soldiers they are to be and not shopkeepers, the watchdogs and guardians of
the sheep; and luxury and avarice will turn them into wolves and tyrants. Their habits
and their dwellings should correspond to their education. They should have no property;
their pay should only meet their expenses; and they should have common meals. Gold
and silver we will tell them that they have from God, and this divine gift in their souls
they must not alloy with that earthly dross which passes under the name of gold. They
only of the citizens may not touch it, or be under the same roof with it, or drink from it;
it is the accursed thing. Should they ever acquire houses or lands or money of their own,
they will become householders and tradesmen instead of guardians, enemies and
tyrants instead of helpers, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and the rest of the
State, will be at hand.
The religious and ethical aspect of Plato’s education will hereafter be considered under a
separate head. Some lesser points may be more conveniently noticed in this place.
1. The constant appeal to the authority of Homer, whom, with grave irony, Plato, after
the manner of his age, summons as a witness about ethics and psychology, as well as
about diet and medicine; attempting to distinguish the better lesson from the worse,
sometimes altering the text from design; more than once quoting or alluding to Homer
inaccurately, after the manner of the early logographers turning the Iliad into prose, and
delighting to draw far-fetched inferences from his words, or to make ludicrous
applications of them. He does not, like Heracleitus, get into a rage with Homer and
Archilochus (Heracl.), but uses their words and expressions as vehicles of a higher truth;
not on a system like Theagenes of Rhegium or Metrodorus, or in later times the Stoics,
but as fancy may dictate. And the conclusions drawn from them are sound, although the
premises are fictitious. These fanciful appeals to Homer add a charm to Plato’s style, and
at the same time they have the effect of a satire on the follies of Homeric interpretation.
To us (and probably to himself), although they take the form of arguments, they are
really figures of speech. They may be compared with modern citations from Scripture,
which have often a great rhetorical power even when the original meaning of the words
is entirely lost sight of. The real, like the Platonic Socrates, as we gather from the
Memorabilia of Xenophon, was fond of making similar adaptations. Great in all ages and
countries, in religion as well as in law and literature, has been the art of interpretation.
2. ‘The style is to conform to the subject and the metre to the style.’ Notwithstanding
the fascination which the word ‘classical’ exercises over us, we can hardly maintain that
this rule is observed in all the Greek poetry which has come down to us. We cannot
deny that the thought often exceeds the power of lucid expression in Aeschylus and
Pindar; or that rhetoric gets the better of the thought in the Sophist-poet Euripides.
Only perhaps in Sophocles is there a perfect harmony of the two; in him alone do we
find a grace of language like the beauty of a Greek statue, in which there is nothing to
add or to take away; at least this is true of single plays or of large portions of them. The
connection in the Tragic Choruses and in the Greek lyric poets is not unfrequently a
tangled thread which in an age before logic the poet was unable to draw out. Many
thoughts and feelings mingled in his mind, and he had no power of disengaging or
arranging them. For there is a subtle influence of logic which requires to be transferred
from prose to poetry, just as the music and perfection of language are infused by poetry
into prose. In all ages the poet has been a bad judge of his own meaning (Apol.); for he
does not see that the word which is full of associations to his own mind is difficult and
unmeaning to that of another; or that the sequence which is clear to himself is puzzling
to others. There are many passages in some of our greatest modern poets which are far
too obscure; in which there is no proportion between style and subject, in which any
half-expressed figure, any harsh construction, any distorted collocation of words, any
remote sequence of ideas is admitted; and there is no voice ‘coming sweetly from
nature,’ or music adding the expression of feeling to thought. As if there could be
poetry without beauty, or beauty without ease and clearness. The obscurities of early
Greek poets arose necessarily out of the state of language and logic which existed in
their age. They are not examples to be followed by us; for the use of language ought in
every generation to become clearer and clearer. Like Shakespere, they were great in
spite, not in consequence, of their imperfections of expression. But there is no reason
for returning to the necessary obscurity which prevailed in the infancy of literature. The
English poets of the last century were certainly not obscure; and we have no excuse for
losing what they had gained, or for going back to the earlier or transitional age which
preceded them. The thought of our own times has not out-stripped language; a want of
Plato’s ‘art of measuring’ is the rule cause of the disproportion between them.
3. In the third book of the Republic a nearer approach is made to a theory of art than
anywhere else in Plato. His views may be summed up as follows:—True art is not fanciful
and imitative, but simple and ideal,— the expression of the highest moral energy,
whether in action or repose. To live among works of plastic art which are of this noble
and simple character, or to listen to such strains, is the best of influences,—the true
Greek atmosphere, in which youth should be brought up. That is the way to create in
them a natural good taste, which will have a feeling of truth and beauty in all things. For
though the poets are to be expelled, still art is recognized as another aspect of reason—
like love in the Symposium, extending over the same sphere, but confined to the
preliminary education, and acting through the power of habit; and this conception of art
is not limited to strains of music or the forms of plastic art, but pervades all nature and
has a wide kindred in the world. The Republic of Plato, like the Athens of Pericles, has an
artistic as well as a political side.
There is hardly any mention in Plato of the creative arts; only in two or three passages
does he even allude to them (Rep.; Soph.). He is not lost in rapture at the great works of
Phidias, the Parthenon, the Propylea, the statues of Zeus or Athene. He would probably
have regarded any abstract truth of number or figure as higher than the greatest of
them. Yet it is hard to suppose that some influence, such as he hopes to inspire in youth,
did not pass into his own mind from the works of art which he saw around him. We are
living upon the fragments of them, and find in a few broken stones the standard of truth
and beauty. But in Plato this feeling has no expression; he nowhere says that beauty is
the object of art; he seems to deny that wisdom can take an external form (Phaedrus);
he does not distinguish the fine from the mechanical arts. Whether or no, like some
writers, he felt more than he expressed, it is at any rate remarkable that the greatest
perfection of the fine arts should coincide with an almost entire silence about them. In
one very striking passage he tells us that a work of art, like the State, is a whole; and this
conception of a whole and the love of the newly-born mathematical sciences may be
regarded, if not as the inspiring, at any rate as the regulating principles of Greek art
(Xen. Mem.; and Sophist).
4. Plato makes the true and subtle remark that the physician had better not be in robust
health; and should have known what illness is in his own person. But the judge ought to
have had no similar experience of evil; he is to be a good man who, having passed his
youth in innocence, became acquainted late in life with the vices of others. And
therefore, according to Plato, a judge should not be young, just as a young man
according to Aristotle is not fit to be a hearer of moral philosophy. The bad, on the
other hand, have a knowledge of vice, but no knowledge of virtue. It may be doubted,
however, whether this train of reflection is well founded. In a remarkable passage of the
Laws it is acknowledged that the evil may form a correct estimate of the good. The
union of gentleness and courage in Book ii. at first seemed to be a paradox, yet was
afterwards ascertained to be a truth. And Plato might also have found that the intuition
of evil may be consistent with the abhorrence of it. There is a directness of aim in virtue
which gives an insight into vice. And the knowledge of character is in some degree a
natural sense independent of any special experience of good or evil.
5. One of the most remarkable conceptions of Plato, because unGreek and also very
different from anything which existed at all in his age of the world, is the transposition
of ranks. In the Spartan state there had been enfranchisement of Helots and
degradation of citizens under special circumstances. And in the ancient Greek
aristocracies, merit was certainly recognized as one of the elements on which
government was based. The founders of states were supposed to be their benefactors,
who were raised by their great actions above the ordinary level of humanity; at a later
period, the services of warriors and legislators were held to entitle them and their
descendants to the privileges of citizenship and to the first rank in the state. And
although the existence of an ideal aristocracy is slenderly proven from the remains of
early Greek history, and we have a difficulty in ascribing such a character, however the
idea may be defined, to any actual Hellenic state—or indeed to any state which has ever
existed in the world—still the rule of the best was certainly the aspiration of
philosophers, who probably accommodated a good deal their views of primitive history
to their own notions of good government. Plato further insists on applying to the
guardians of his state a series of tests by which all those who fell short of a fixed
standard were either removed from the governing body, or not admitted to it; and this
‘academic’ discipline did to a certain extent prevail in Greek states, especially in Sparta.
He also indicates that the system of caste, which existed in a great part of the ancient,
and is by no means extinct in the modern European world, should be set aside from
time to time in favour of merit. He is aware how deeply the greater part of mankind
resent any interference with the order of society, and therefore he proposes his novel
idea in the form of what he himself calls a ‘monstrous fiction.’ (Compare the ceremony
of preparation for the two ‘great waves’ in Book v.) Two principles are indicated by him:
first, that there is a distinction of ranks dependent on circumstances prior to the
individual: second, that this distinction is and ought to be broken through by personal
qualities. He adapts mythology like the Homeric poems to the wants of the state,
making ‘the Phoenician tale’ the vehicle of his ideas. Every Greek state had a myth
respecting its own origin; the Platonic republic may also have a tale of earthborn men.
The gravity and verisimilitude with which the tale is told, and the analogy of Greek
tradition, are a sufficient verification of the ‘monstrous falsehood.’ Ancient poetry had
spoken of a gold and silver and brass and iron age succeeding one another, but Plato
supposes these differences in the natures of men to exist together in a single state.
Mythology supplies a figure under which the lesson may be taught (as Protagoras says,
‘the myth is more interesting’), and also enables Plato to touch lightly on new principles
without going into details. In this passage he shadows forth a general truth, but he does
not tell us by what steps the transposition of ranks is to be effected. Indeed throughout
the Republic he allows the lower ranks to fade into the distance. We do not know
whether they are to carry arms, and whether in the fifth book they are or are not
included in the communistic regulations respecting property and marriage. Nor is there
any use in arguing strictly either from a few chance words, or from the silence of Plato,
or in drawing inferences which were beyond his vision. Aristotle, in his criticism on the
position of the lower classes, does not perceive that the poetical creation is ‘like the air,
invulnerable,’ and cannot be penetrated by the shafts of his logic (Pol.).
6. Two paradoxes which strike the modern reader as in the highest degree fanciful and
ideal, and which suggest to him many reflections, are to be found in the third book of
the Republic: first, the great power of music, so much beyond any influence which is
experienced by us in modern times, when the art or science has been far more
developed, and has found the secret of harmony, as well as of melody; secondly, the
indefinite and almost absolute control which the soul is supposed to exercise over the
body.
In the first we suspect some degree of exaggeration, such as we may also observe
among certain masters of the art, not unknown to us, at the present day. With this
natural enthusiasm, which is felt by a few only, there seems to mingle in Plato a sort of
Pythagorean reverence for numbers and numerical proportion to which Aristotle is a
stranger. Intervals of sound and number are to him sacred things which have a law of
their own, not dependent on the variations of sense. They rise above sense, and become
a connecting link with the world of ideas. But it is evident that Plato is describing what
to him appears to be also a fact. The power of a simple and characteristic melody on the
impressible mind of the Greek is more than we can easily appreciate. The effect of
national airs may bear some comparison with it. And, besides all this, there is a
confusion between the harmony of musical notes and the harmony of soul and body,
which is so potently inspired by them.
The second paradox leads up to some curious and interesting questions—How far can
the mind control the body? Is the relation between them one of mutual antagonism or
of mutual harmony? Are they two or one, and is either of them the cause of the other?
May we not at times drop the opposition between them, and the mode of describing
them, which is so familiar to us, and yet hardly conveys any precise meaning, and try to
view this composite creature, man, in a more simple manner? Must we not at any rate
admit that there is in human nature a higher and a lower principle, divided by no distinct
line, which at times break asunder and take up arms against one another? Or again, they
are reconciled and move together, either unconsciously in the ordinary work of life, or
consciously in the pursuit of some noble aim, to be attained not without an effort, and
for which every thought and nerve are strained. And then the body becomes the good
friend or ally, or servant or instrument of the mind. And the mind has often a wonderful
and almost superhuman power of banishing disease and weakness and calling out a
hidden strength. Reason and the desires, the intellect and the senses are brought into
harmony and obedience so as to form a single human being. They are ever parting, ever
meeting; and the identity or diversity of their tendencies or operations is for the most
part unnoticed by us. When the mind touches the body through the appetites, we
acknowledge the responsibility of the one to the other. There is a tendency in us which
says ‘Drink.’ There is another which says, ‘Do not drink; it is not good for you.’ And we all
of us know which is the rightful superior. We are also responsible for our health,
although into this sphere there enter some elements of necessity which may be beyond
our control. Still even in the management of health, care and thought, continued over
many years, may make us almost free agents, if we do not exact too much of ourselves,
and if we acknowledge that all human freedom is limited by the laws of nature and of
mind.
We are disappointed to find that Plato, in the general condemnation which he passes on
the practice of medicine prevailing in his own day, depreciates the effects of diet. He
would like to have diseases of a definite character and capable of receiving a definite
treatment. He is afraid of invalidism interfering with the business of life. He does not
recognize that time is the great healer both of mental and bodily disorders; and that
remedies which are gradual and proceed little by little are safer than those which
produce a sudden catastrophe. Neither does he see that there is no way in which the
mind can more surely influence the body than by the control of eating and drinking; or
any other action or occasion of human life on which the higher freedom of the will can
be more simple or truly asserted.
7. Lesser matters of style may be remarked.
(1) The affected ignorance of music, which is Plato’s way of expressing that he is passing
lightly over the subject.
(2) The tentative manner in which here, as in the second book, he proceeds with the
construction of the State.
(3) The description of the State sometimes as a reality, and then again as a work of
imagination only; these are the arts by which he sustains the reader’s interest.
(4) Connecting links, or the preparation for the entire expulsion of the poets in Book X.
(5) The companion pictures of the lover of litigation and the valetudinarian, the satirical
jest about the maxim of Phocylides, the manner in which the image of the gold and
silver citizens is taken up into the subject, and the argument from the practice of
Asclepius, should not escape notice.
BOOK IV.
Adeimantus said: ‘Suppose a person to argue, Socrates, that you make your citizens
miserable, and this by their own free-will; they are the lords of the city, and yet instead
of having, like other men, lands and houses and money of their own, they live as
mercenaries and are always mounting guard.’ You may add, I replied, that they receive
no pay but only their food, and have no money to spend on a journey or a mistress.
‘Well, and what answer do you give?’ My answer is, that our guardians may or may not
be the happiest of men,—I should not be surprised to find in the long-run that they
were,—but this is not the aim of our constitution, which was designed for the good of
the whole and not of any one part. If I went to a sculptor and blamed him for having
painted the eye, which is the noblest feature of the face, not purple but black, he would
reply: ‘The eye must be an eye, and you should look at the statue as a whole.’ ‘Now I can
well imagine a fool’s paradise, in which everybody is eating and drinking, clothed in
purple and fine linen, and potters lie on sofas and have their wheel at hand, that they
may work a little when they please; and cobblers and all the other classes of a State lose
their distinctive character. And a State may get on without cobblers; but when the
guardians degenerate into boon companions, then the ruin is complete. Remember that
we are not talking of peasants keeping holiday, but of a State in which every man is
expected to do his own work. The happiness resides not in this or that class, but in the
State as a whole. I have another remark to make:—A middle condition is best for
artisans; they should have money enough to buy tools, and not enough to be
independent of business. And will not the same condition be best for our citizens? If
they are poor, they will be mean; if rich, luxurious and lazy; and in neither case
contented. ‘But then how will our poor city be able to go to war against an enemy who
has money?’ There may be a difficulty in fighting against one enemy; against two there
will be none. In the first place, the contest will be carried on by trained warriors against
well-to-do citizens: and is not a regular athlete an easy match for two stout opponents
at least? Suppose also, that before engaging we send ambassadors to one of the two
cities, saying, ‘Silver and gold we have not; do you help us and take our share of the
spoil;’—who would fight against the lean, wiry dogs, when they might join with them in
preying upon the fatted sheep? ‘But if many states join their resources, shall we not be
in danger?’ I am amused to hear you use the word ‘state’ of any but our own State. They
are ‘states,’ but not ‘a state’—many in one. For in every state there are two hostile
nations, rich and poor, which you may set one against the other. But our State, while she
remains true to her principles, will be in very deed the mightiest of Hellenic states.
To the size of the state there is no limit but the necessity of unity; it must be neither too
large nor too small to be one. This is a matter of secondary importance, like the
principle of transposition which was intimated in the parable of the earthborn men. The
meaning there implied was that every man should do that for which he was fitted, and
be at one with himself, and then the whole city would be united. But all these things are
secondary, if education, which is the great matter, be duly regarded. When the wheel
has once been set in motion, the speed is always increasing; and each generation
improves upon the preceding, both in physical and moral qualities. The care of the
governors should be directed to preserve music and gymnastic from innovation; alter
the songs of a country, Damon says, and you will soon end by altering its laws. The
change appears innocent at first, and begins in play; but the evil soon becomes serious,
working secretly upon the characters of individuals, then upon social and commercial
relations, and lastly upon the institutions of a state; and there is ruin and confusion
everywhere. But if education remains in the established form, there will be no danger. A
restorative process will be always going on; the spirit of law and order will raise up what
has fallen down. Nor will any regulations be needed for the lesser matters of life—rules
of deportment or fashions of dress. Like invites like for good or for evil. Education will
correct deficiencies and supply the power of self-government. Far be it from us to enter
into the particulars of legislation; let the guardians take care of education, and
education will take care of all other things.
But without education they may patch and mend as they please; they will make no
progress, any more than a patient who thinks to cure himself by some favourite remedy
and will not give up his luxurious mode of living. If you tell such persons that they must
first alter their habits, then they grow angry; they are charming people. ‘Charming,—nay,
the very reverse.’ Evidently these gentlemen are not in your good graces, nor the state
which is like them. And such states there are which first ordain under penalty of death
that no one shall alter the constitution, and then suffer themselves to be flattered into
and out of anything; and he who indulges them and fawns upon them, is their leader
and saviour. ‘Yes, the men are as bad as the states.’ But do you not admire their
cleverness? ‘Nay, some of them are stupid enough to believe what the people tell them.’
And when all the world is telling a man that he is six feet high, and he has no measure,
how can he believe anything else? But don’t get into a passion: to see our statesmen
trying their nostrums, and fancying that they can cut off at a blow the Hydra-like
rogueries of mankind, is as good as a play. Minute enactments are superfluous in good
states, and are useless in bad ones.
And now what remains of the work of legislation? Nothing for us; but to Apollo the god
of Delphi we leave the ordering of the greatest of all things—that is to say, religion. Only
our ancestral deity sitting upon the centre and navel of the earth will be trusted by us if
we have any sense, in an affair of such magnitude. No foreign god shall be supreme in
our realms...
Here, as Socrates would say, let us ‘reflect on’ (Greek) what has preceded: thus far we
have spoken not of the happiness of the citizens, but only of the well-being of the State.
They may be the happiest of men, but our principal aim in founding the State was not to
make them happy. They were to be guardians, not holiday-makers. In this pleasant
manner is presented to us the famous question both of ancient and modern philosophy,
touching the relation of duty to happiness, of right to utility.
First duty, then happiness, is the natural order of our moral ideas. The utilitarian
principle is valuable as a corrective of error, and shows to us a side of ethics which is apt
to be neglected. It may be admitted further that right and utility are co-extensive, and
that he who makes the happiness of mankind his object has one of the highest and
noblest motives of human action. But utility is not the historical basis of morality; nor
the aspect in which moral and religious ideas commonly occur to the mind. The greatest
happiness of all is, as we believe, the far-off result of the divine government of the
universe. The greatest happiness of the individual is certainly to be found in a life of
virtue and goodness. But we seem to be more assured of a law of right than we can be
of a divine purpose, that ‘all mankind should be saved;’ and we infer the one from the
other. And the greatest happiness of the individual may be the reverse of the greatest
happiness in the ordinary sense of the term, and may be realised in a life of pain, or in a
voluntary death. Further, the word ‘happiness’ has several ambiguities; it may mean
either pleasure or an ideal life, happiness subjective or objective, in this world or in
another, of ourselves only or of our neighbours and of all men everywhere. By the
modern founder of Utilitarianism the self-regarding and disinterested motives of action
are included under the same term, although they are commonly opposed by us as
benevolence and self-love. The word happiness has not the definiteness or the
sacredness of ‘truth’ and ‘right’; it does not equally appeal to our higher nature, and has
not sunk into the conscience of mankind. It is associated too much with the comforts
and conveniences of life; too little with ‘the goods of the soul which we desire for their
own sake.’ In a great trial, or danger, or temptation, or in any great and heroic action, it
is scarcely thought of. For these reasons ‘the greatest happiness’ principle is not the true
foundation of ethics. But though not the first principle, it is the second, which is like
unto it, and is often of easier application. For the larger part of human actions are
neither right nor wrong, except in so far as they tend to the happiness of mankind
(Introd. to Gorgias and Philebus).
The same question reappears in politics, where the useful or expedient seems to claim a
larger sphere and to have a greater authority. For concerning political measures, we
chiefly ask: How will they affect the happiness of mankind? Yet here too we may observe
that what we term expediency is merely the law of right limited by the conditions of
human society. Right and truth are the highest aims of government as well as of
individuals; and we ought not to lose sight of them because we cannot directly enforce
them. They appeal to the better mind of nations; and sometimes they are too much for
merely temporal interests to resist. They are the watchwords which all men use in
matters of public policy, as well as in their private dealings; the peace of Europe may be
said to depend upon them. In the most commercial and utilitarian states of society the
power of ideas remains. And all the higher class of statesmen have in them something
of that idealism which Pericles is said to have gathered from the teaching of
Anaxagoras. They recognise that the true leader of men must be above the motives of
ambition, and that national character is of greater value than material comfort and
prosperity. And this is the order of thought in Plato; first, he expects his citizens to do
their duty, and then under favourable circumstances, that is to say, in a well-ordered
State, their happiness is assured. That he was far from excluding the modern principle of
utility in politics is sufficiently evident from other passages; in which ‘the most beneficial
is affirmed to be the most honourable’, and also ‘the most sacred’.
We may note
(1) The manner in which the objection of Adeimantus here, is designed to draw out and
deepen the argument of Socrates.
(2) The conception of a whole as lying at the foundation both of politics and of art, in
the latter supplying the only principle of criticism, which, under the various names of
harmony, symmetry, measure, proportion, unity, the Greek seems to have applied to
works of art.
(3) The requirement that the State should be limited in size, after the traditional model
of a Greek state; as in the Politics of Aristotle, the fact that the cities of Hellas were small
is converted into a principle.
(4) The humorous pictures of the lean dogs and the fatted sheep, of the light active
boxer upsetting two stout gentlemen at least, of the ‘charming’ patients who are always
making themselves worse; or again, the playful assumption that there is no State but our
own; or the grave irony with which the statesman is excused who believes that he is six
feet high because he is told so, and having nothing to measure with is to be pardoned
for his ignorance—he is too amusing for us to be seriously angry with him.
(5) The light and superficial manner in which religion is passed over when provision has
been made for two great principles,—first, that religion shall be based on the highest
conception of the gods, secondly, that the true national or Hellenic type shall be
maintained...
Socrates proceeds: But where amid all this is justice? Son of Ariston, tell me where. Light
a candle and search the city, and get your brother and the rest of our friends to help in
seeking for her. ‘That won’t do,’ replied Glaucon, ‘you yourself promised to make the
search and talked about the impiety of deserting justice.’ Well, I said, I will lead the way,
but do you follow. My notion is, that our State being perfect will contain all the four
virtues—wisdom, courage, temperance, justice. If we eliminate the three first, the
unknown remainder will be justice.
First then, of wisdom: the State which we have called into being will be wise because
politic. And policy is one among many kinds of skill,—not the skill of the carpenter, or of
the worker in metal, or of the husbandman, but the skill of him who advises about the
interests of the whole State. Of such a kind is the skill of the guardians, who are a small
class in number, far smaller than the blacksmiths; but in them is concentrated the
wisdom of the State. And if this small ruling class have wisdom, then the whole State will
be wise.
Our second virtue is courage, which we have no difficulty in finding in another class—
that of soldiers. Courage may be defined as a sort of salvation—the never-failing
salvation of the opinions which law and education have prescribed concerning dangers.
You know the way in which dyers first prepare the white ground and then lay on the dye
of purple or of any other colour. Colours dyed in this way become fixed, and no soap or
lye will ever wash them out. Now the ground is education, and the laws are the colours;
and if the ground is properly laid, neither the soap of pleasure nor the lye of pain or fear
will ever wash them out. This power which preserves right opinion about danger I would
ask you to call ‘courage,’ adding the epithet ‘political’ or ‘civilized’ in order to distinguish
it from mere animal courage and from a higher courage which may hereafter be
discussed.
Two virtues remain; temperance and justice. More than the preceding virtues
temperance suggests the idea of harmony. Some light is thrown upon the nature of this
virtue by the popular description of a man as ‘master of himself’—which has an absurd
sound, because the master is also the servant. The expression really means that the
better principle in a man masters the worse. There are in cities whole classes—women,
slaves and the like—who correspond to the worse, and a few only to the better; and in
our State the former class are held under control by the latter. Now to which of these
classes does temperance belong? ‘To both of them.’ And our State if any will be the
abode of temperance; and we were right in describing this virtue as a harmony which is
diffused through the whole, making the dwellers in the city to be of one mind, and
attuning the upper and middle and lower classes like the strings of an instrument,
whether you suppose them to differ in wisdom, strength or wealth.
And now we are near the spot; let us draw in and surround the cover and watch with all
our eyes, lest justice should slip away and escape. Tell me, if you see the thicket move
first. ‘Nay, I would have you lead.’ Well then, offer up a prayer and follow. The way is
dark and difficult; but we must push on. I begin to see a track. ‘Good news.’ Why,
Glaucon, our dulness of scent is quite ludicrous! While we are straining our eyes into the
distance, justice is tumbling out at our feet. We are as bad as people looking for a thing
which they have in their hands. Have you forgotten our old principle of the division of
labour, or of every man doing his own business, concerning which we spoke at the
foundation of the State—what but this was justice? Is there any other virtue remaining
which can compete with wisdom and temperance and courage in the scale of political
virtue? For ‘every one having his own’ is the great object of government; and the great
object of trade is that every man should do his own business. Not that there is much
harm in a carpenter trying to be a cobbler, or a cobbler transforming himself into a
carpenter; but great evil may arise from the cobbler leaving his last and turning into a
guardian or legislator, or when a single individual is trainer, warrior, legislator, all in one.
And this evil is injustice, or every man doing another’s business. I do not say that as yet
we are in a condition to arrive at a final conclusion. For the definition which we believe
to hold good in states has still to be tested by the individual. Having read the large
letters we will now come back to the small. From the two together a brilliant light may
be struck out...
Socrates proceeds to discover the nature of justice by a method of residues. Each of the
first three virtues corresponds to one of the three parts of the soul and one of the three
classes in the State, although the third, temperance, has more of the nature of a
harmony than the first two. If there be a fourth virtue, that can only be sought for in the
relation of the three parts in the soul or classes in the State to one another. It is obvious
and simple, and for that very reason has not been found out. The modern logician will
be inclined to object that ideas cannot be separated like chemical substances, but that
they run into one another and may be only different aspects or names of the same
thing, and such in this instance appears to be the case. For the definition here given of
justice is verbally the same as one of the definitions of temperance given by Socrates in
the Charmides, which however is only provisional, and is afterwards rejected. And so far
from justice remaining over when the other virtues are eliminated, the justice and
temperance of the Republic can with difficulty be distinguished. Temperance appears to
be the virtue of a part only, and one of three, whereas justice is a universal virtue of the
whole soul. Yet on the other hand temperance is also described as a sort of harmony,
and in this respect is akin to justice. Justice seems to differ from temperance in degree
rather than in kind; whereas temperance is the harmony of discordant elements, justice
is the perfect order by which all natures and classes do their own business, the right
man in the right place, the division and co-operation of all the citizens. Justice, again, is
a more abstract notion than the other virtues, and therefore, from Plato’s point of view,
the foundation of them, to which they are referred and which in idea precedes them.
The proposal to omit temperance is a mere trick of style intended to avoid monotony.
There is a famous question discussed in one of the earlier Dialogues of Plato
(Protagoras; Arist. Nic. Ethics), ‘Whether the virtues are one or many?’ This receives an
answer which is to the effect that there are four cardinal virtues (now for the first time
brought together in ethical philosophy), and one supreme over the rest, which is not like
Aristotle’s conception of universal justice, virtue relative to others, but the whole of
virtue relative to the parts. To this universal conception of justice or order in the first
education and in the moral nature of man, the still more universal conception of the
good in the second education and in the sphere of speculative knowledge seems to
succeed. Both might be equally described by the terms ‘law,’ ‘order,’ ‘harmony;’ but
while the idea of good embraces ‘all time and all existence,’ the conception of justice is
not extended beyond man.
...Socrates is now going to identify the individual and the State. But first he must prove
that there are three parts of the individual soul. His argument is as follows:—Quantity
makes no difference in quality. The word ‘just,’ whether applied to the individual or to
the State, has the same meaning. And the term ‘justice’ implied that the same three
principles in the State and in the individual were doing their own business. But are they
really three or one? The question is difficult, and one which can hardly be solved by the
methods which we are now using; but the truer and longer way would take up too much
of our time. ‘The shorter will satisfy me.’ Well then, you would admit that the qualities of
states mean the qualities of the individuals who compose them? The Scythians and
Thracians are passionate, our own race intellectual, and the Egyptians and Phoenicians
covetous, because the individual members of each have such and such a character; the
difficulty is to determine whether the several principles are one or three; whether, that is
to say, we reason with one part of our nature, desire with another, are angry with
another, or whether the whole soul comes into play in each sort of action. This enquiry,
however, requires a very exact definition of terms. The same thing in the same relation
cannot be affected in two opposite ways. But there is no impossibility in a man standing
still, yet moving his arms, or in a top which is fixed on one spot going round upon its
axis. There is no necessity to mention all the possible exceptions; let us provisionally
assume that opposites cannot do or be or suffer opposites in the same relation. And to
the class of opposites belong assent and dissent, desire and avoidance. And one form of
desire is thirst and hunger: and here arises a new point—thirst is thirst of drink, hunger
is hunger of food; not of warm drink or of a particular kind of food, with the single
exception of course that the very fact of our desiring anything implies that it is good.
When relative terms have no attributes, their correlatives have no attributes; when they
have attributes, their correlatives also have them. For example, the term ‘greater’ is
simply relative to ‘less,’ and knowledge refers to a subject of knowledge. But on the
other hand, a particular knowledge is of a particular subject. Again, every science has a
distinct character, which is defined by an object; medicine, for example, is the science of
health, although not to be confounded with health. Having cleared our ideas thus far, let
us return to the original instance of thirst, which has a definite object—drink. Now the
thirsty soul may feel two distinct impulses; the animal one saying ‘Drink;’ the rational
one, which says ‘Do not drink.’ The two impulses are contradictory; and therefore we
may assume that they spring from distinct principles in the soul. But is passion a third
principle, or akin to desire? There is a story of a certain Leontius which throws some
light on this question. He was coming up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, and he
passed a spot where there were dead bodies lying by the executioner. He felt a longing
desire to see them and also an abhorrence of them; at first he turned away and shut his
eyes, then, suddenly tearing them open, he said,—‘Take your fill, ye wretches, of the fair
sight.’ Now is there not here a third principle which is often found to come to the
assistance of reason against desire, but never of desire against reason? This is passion or
spirit, of the separate existence of which we may further convince ourselves by putting
the following case:—When a man suffers justly, if he be of a generous nature he is not
indignant at the hardships which he undergoes: but when he suffers unjustly, his
indignation is his great support; hunger and thirst cannot tame him; the spirit within him
must do or die, until the voice of the shepherd, that is, of reason, bidding his dog bark
no more, is heard within. This shows that passion is the ally of reason. Is passion then
the same with reason? No, for the former exists in children and brutes; and Homer
affords a proof of the distinction between them when he says, ‘He smote his breast, and
thus rebuked his soul.’
And now, at last, we have reached firm ground, and are able to infer that the virtues of
the State and of the individual are the same. For wisdom and courage and justice in the
State are severally the wisdom and courage and justice in the individuals who form the
State. Each of the three classes will do the work of its own class in the State, and each
part in the individual soul; reason, the superior, and passion, the inferior, will be
harmonized by the influence of music and gymnastic. The counsellor and the warrior,
the head and the arm, will act together in the town of Mansoul, and keep the desires in
proper subjection. The courage of the warrior is that quality which preserves a right
opinion about dangers in spite of pleasures and pains. The wisdom of the counsellor is
that small part of the soul which has authority and reason. The virtue of temperance is
the friendship of the ruling and the subject principles, both in the State and in the
individual. Of justice we have already spoken; and the notion already given of it may be
confirmed by common instances. Will the just state or the just individual steal, lie,
commit adultery, or be guilty of impiety to gods and men? ‘No.’ And is not the reason of
this that the several principles, whether in the state or in the individual, do their own
business? And justice is the quality which makes just men and just states. Moreover, our
old division of labour, which required that there should be one man for one use, was a
dream or anticipation of what was to follow; and that dream has now been realized in
justice, which begins by binding together the three chords of the soul, and then acts
harmoniously in every relation of life. And injustice, which is the insubordination and
disobedience of the inferior elements in the soul, is the opposite of justice, and is
inharmonious and unnatural, being to the soul what disease is to the body; for in the
soul as well as in the body, good or bad actions produce good or bad habits. And virtue
is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice is the disease and
weakness and deformity of the soul.
Again the old question returns upon us: Is justice or injustice the more profitable? The
question has become ridiculous. For injustice, like mortal disease, makes life not worth
having. Come up with me to the hill which overhangs the city and look down upon the
single form of virtue, and the infinite forms of vice, among which are four special ones,
characteristic both of states and of individuals. And the state which corresponds to the
single form of virtue is that which we have been describing, wherein reason rules under
one of two names—monarchy and aristocracy. Thus there are five forms in all, both of
states and of souls...
In attempting to prove that the soul has three separate faculties, Plato takes occasion to
discuss what makes difference of faculties. And the criterion which he proposes is
difference in the working of the faculties. The same faculty cannot produce
contradictory effects. But the path of early reasoners is beset by thorny entanglements,
and he will not proceed a step without first clearing the ground. This leads him into a
tiresome digression, which is intended to explain the nature of contradiction. First, the
contradiction must be at the same time and in the same relation. Secondly, no
extraneous word must be introduced into either of the terms in which the contradictory
proposition is expressed: for example, thirst is of drink, not of warm drink. He implies,
what he does not say, that if, by the advice of reason, or by the impulse of anger, a man
is restrained from drinking, this proves that thirst, or desire under which thirst is
included, is distinct from anger and reason. But suppose that we allow the term ‘thirst’
or ‘desire’ to be modified, and say an ‘angry thirst,’ or a ‘revengeful desire,’ then the two
spheres of desire and anger overlap and become confused. This case therefore has to be
excluded. And still there remains an exception to the rule in the use of the term ‘good,’
which is always implied in the object of desire. These are the discussions of an age
before logic; and any one who is wearied by them should remember that they are
necessary to the clearing up of ideas in the first development of the human faculties.
The psychology of Plato extends no further than the division of the soul into the
rational, irascible, and concupiscent elements, which, as far as we know, was first made
by him, and has been retained by Aristotle and succeeding ethical writers. The chief
difficulty in this early analysis of the mind is to define exactly the place of the irascible
faculty (Greek), which may be variously described under the terms righteous indignation,
spirit, passion. It is the foundation of courage, which includes in Plato moral courage,
the courage of enduring pain, and of surmounting intellectual difficulties, as well as of
meeting dangers in war. Though irrational, it inclines to side with the rational: it cannot
be aroused by punishment when justly inflicted: it sometimes takes the form of an
enthusiasm which sustains a man in the performance of great actions. It is the ‘lion
heart’ with which the reason makes a treaty. On the other hand it is negative rather than
positive; it is indignant at wrong or falsehood, but does not, like Love in the Symposium
and Phaedrus, aspire to the vision of Truth or Good. It is the peremptory military spirit
which prevails in the government of honour. It differs from anger (Greek), this latter
term having no accessory notion of righteous indignation. Although Aristotle has
retained the word, yet we may observe that ‘passion’ (Greek) has with him lost its affinity
to the rational and has become indistinguishable from ‘anger’ (Greek). And to this
vernacular use Plato himself in the Laws seems to revert, though not always. By modern
philosophy too, as well as in our ordinary conversation, the words anger or passion are
employed almost exclusively in a bad sense; there is no connotation of a just or
reasonable cause by which they are aroused. The feeling of ‘righteous indignation’ is too
partial and accidental to admit of our regarding it as a separate virtue or habit. We are
tempted also to doubt whether Plato is right in supposing that an offender, however
justly condemned, could be expected to acknowledge the justice of his sentence; this is
the spirit of a philosopher or martyr rather than of a criminal.
We may observe how nearly Plato approaches Aristotle’s famous thesis, that ‘good
actions produce good habits.’ The words ‘as healthy practices (Greek) produce health, so
do just practices produce justice,’ have a sound very like the Nicomachean Ethics. But we
note also that an incidental remark in Plato has become a far-reaching principle in
Aristotle, and an inseparable part of a great Ethical system.
There is a difficulty in understanding what Plato meant by ‘the longer way’: he seems to
intimate some metaphysic of the future which will not be satisfied with arguing from the
principle of contradiction. In the sixth and seventh books (compare Sophist and
Parmenides) he has given us a sketch of such a metaphysic; but when Glaucon asks for
the final revelation of the idea of good, he is put off with the declaration that he has not
yet studied the preliminary sciences. How he would have filled up the sketch, or argued
about such questions from a higher point of view, we can only conjecture. Perhaps he
hoped to find some a priori method of developing the parts out of the whole; or he
might have asked which of the ideas contains the other ideas, and possibly have
stumbled on the Hegelian identity of the ‘ego’ and the ‘universal.’ Or he may have
imagined that ideas might be constructed in some manner analogous to the
construction of figures and numbers in the mathematical sciences. The most certain and
necessary truth was to Plato the universal; and to this he was always seeking to refer all
knowledge or opinion, just as in modern times we seek to rest them on the opposite
pole of induction and experience. The aspirations of metaphysicians have always tended
to pass beyond the limits of human thought and language: they seem to have reached a
height at which they are ‘moving about in worlds unrealized,’ and their conceptions,
although profoundly affecting their own minds, become invisible or unintelligible to
others. We are not therefore surprized to find that Plato himself has nowhere clearly
explained his doctrine of ideas; or that his school in a later generation, like his
contemporaries Glaucon and Adeimantus, were unable to follow him in this region of
speculation. In the Sophist, where he is refuting the scepticism which maintained either
that there was no such thing as predication, or that all might be predicated of all, he
arrives at the conclusion that some ideas combine with some, but not all with all. But he
makes only one or two steps forward on this path; he nowhere attains to any connected
system of ideas, or even to a knowledge of the most elementary relations of the
sciences to one another.
BOOK V.
I was going to enumerate the four forms of vice or decline in states, when
Polemarchus—he was sitting a little farther from me than Adeimantus—taking him by
the coat and leaning towards him, said something in an undertone, of which I only
caught the words, ‘Shall we let him off?’ ‘Certainly not,’ said Adeimantus, raising his
voice. Whom, I said, are you not going to let off? ‘You,’ he said. Why? ‘Because we think
that you are not dealing fairly with us in omitting women and children, of whom you
have slily disposed under the general formula that friends have all things in common.’
And was I not right? ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but there are many sorts of communism or
community, and we want to know which of them is right. The company, as you have just
heard, are resolved to have a further explanation.’ Thrasymachus said, ‘Do you think that
we have come hither to dig for gold, or to hear you discourse?’ Yes, I said; but the
discourse should be of a reasonable length. Glaucon added, ‘Yes, Socrates, and there is
reason in spending the whole of life in such discussions; but pray, without more ado, tell
us how this community is to be carried out, and how the interval between birth and
education is to be filled up.’ Well, I said, the subject has several difficulties—What is
possible? is the first question. What is desirable? is the second. ‘Fear not,’ he replied, ‘for
you are speaking among friends.’ That, I replied, is a sorry consolation; I shall destroy my
friends as well as myself. Not that I mind a little innocent laughter; but he who kills the
truth is a murderer. ‘Then,’ said Glaucon, laughing, ‘in case you should murder us we will
acquit you beforehand, and you shall be held free from the guilt of deceiving us.’
Socrates proceeds:—The guardians of our state are to be watch-dogs, as we have
already said. Now dogs are not divided into hes and shes—we do not take the
masculine gender out to hunt and leave the females at home to look after their puppies.
They have the same employments—the only difference between them is that the one
sex is stronger and the other weaker. But if women are to have the same employments
as men, they must have the same education—they must be taught music and
gymnastics, and the art of war. I know that a great joke will be made of their riding on
horseback and carrying weapons; the sight of the naked old wrinkled women showing
their agility in the palaestra will certainly not be a vision of beauty, and may be expected
to become a famous jest. But we must not mind the wits; there was a time when they
might have laughed at our present gymnastics. All is habit: people have at last found out
that the exposure is better than the concealment of the person, and now they laugh no
more. Evil only should be the subject of ridicule.
The first question is, whether women are able either wholly or partially to share in the
employments of men. And here we may be charged with inconsistency in making the
proposal at all. For we started originally with the division of labour; and the diversity of
employments was based on the difference of natures. But is there no difference between
men and women? Nay, are they not wholly different? THERE was the difficulty, Glaucon,
which made me unwilling to speak of family relations. However, when a man is out of
his depth, whether in a pool or in an ocean, he can only swim for his life; and we must
try to find a way of escape, if we can.
The argument is, that different natures have different uses, and the natures of men and
women are said to differ. But this is only a verbal opposition. We do not consider that
the difference may be purely nominal and accidental; for example, a bald man and a
hairy man are opposed in a single point of view, but you cannot infer that because a
bald man is a cobbler a hairy man ought not to be a cobbler. Now why is such an
inference erroneous? Simply because the opposition between them is partial only, like
the difference between a male physician and a female physician, not running through
the whole nature, like the difference between a physician and a carpenter. And if the
difference of the sexes is only that the one beget and the other bear children, this does
not prove that they ought to have distinct educations. Admitting that women differ from
men in capacity, do not men equally differ from one another? Has not nature scattered
all the qualities which our citizens require indifferently up and down among the two
sexes? and even in their peculiar pursuits, are not women often, though in some cases
superior to men, ridiculously enough surpassed by them? Women are the same in kind
as men, and have the same aptitude or want of aptitude for medicine or gymnastic or
war, but in a less degree. One woman will be a good guardian, another not; and the
good must be chosen to be the colleagues of our guardians. If however their natures are
the same, the inference is that their education must also be the same; there is no longer
anything unnatural or impossible in a woman learning music and gymnastic. And the
education which we give them will be the very best, far superior to that of cobblers, and
will train up the very best women, and nothing can be more advantageous to the State
than this. Therefore let them strip, clothed in their chastity, and share in the toils of war
and in the defence of their country; he who laughs at them is a fool for his pains.
The first wave is past, and the argument is compelled to admit that men and women
have common duties and pursuits. A second and greater wave is rolling in-community
of wives and children; is this either expedient or possible? The expediency I do not
doubt; I am not so sure of the possibility. ‘Nay, I think that a considerable doubt will be
entertained on both points.’ I meant to have escaped the trouble of proving the first, but
as you have detected the little stratagem I must even submit. Only allow me to feed my
fancy like the solitary in his walks, with a dream of what might be, and then I will return
to the question of what can be.
In the first place our rulers will enforce the laws and make new ones where they are
wanted, and their allies or ministers will obey. You, as legislator, have already selected
the men; and now you shall select the women. After the selection has been made, they
will dwell in common houses and have their meals in common, and will be brought
together by a necessity more certain than that of mathematics. But they cannot be
allowed to live in licentiousness; that is an unholy thing, which the rulers are determined
to prevent. For the avoidance of this, holy marriage festivals will be instituted, and their
holiness will be in proportion to their usefulness. And here, Glaucon, I should like to ask
(as I know that you are a breeder of birds and animals), Do you not take the greatest
care in the mating? ‘Certainly.’ And there is no reason to suppose that less care is
required in the marriage of human beings. But then our rulers must be skilful physicians
of the State, for they will often need a strong dose of falsehood in order to bring about
desirable unions between their subjects. The good must be paired with the good, and
the bad with the bad, and the offspring of the one must be reared, and of the other
destroyed; in this way the flock will be preserved in prime condition. Hymeneal festivals
will be celebrated at times fixed with an eye to population, and the brides and
bridegrooms will meet at them; and by an ingenious system of lots the rulers will
contrive that the brave and the fair come together, and that those of inferior breed are
paired with inferiors—the latter will ascribe to chance what is really the invention of the
rulers. And when children are born, the offspring of the brave and fair will be carried to
an enclosure in a certain part of the city, and there attended by suitable nurses; the rest
will be hurried away to places unknown. The mothers will be brought to the fold and will
suckle the children; care however must be taken that none of them recognise their own
offspring; and if necessary other nurses may also be hired. The trouble of watching and
getting up at night will be transferred to attendants. ‘Then the wives of our guardians
will have a fine easy time when they are having children.’ And quite right too, I said, that
they should.
The parents ought to be in the prime of life, which for a man may be reckoned at thirty
years—from twenty-five, when he has ‘passed the point at which the speed of life is
greatest,’ to fifty-five; and at twenty years for a woman—from twenty to forty. Any one
above or below those ages who partakes in the hymeneals shall be guilty of impiety;
also every one who forms a marriage connexion at other times without the consent of
the rulers. This latter regulation applies to those who are within the specified ages, after
which they may range at will, provided they avoid the prohibited degrees of parents and
children, or of brothers and sisters, which last, however, are not absolutely prohibited, if
a dispensation be procured. ‘But how shall we know the degrees of affinity, when all
things are common?’ The answer is, that brothers and sisters are all such as are born
seven or nine months after the espousals, and their parents those who are then
espoused, and every one will have many children and every child many parents.
Socrates proceeds: I have now to prove that this scheme is advantageous and also
consistent with our entire polity. The greatest good of a State is unity; the greatest evil,
discord and distraction. And there will be unity where there are no private pleasures or
pains or interests—where if one member suffers all the members suffer, if one citizen is
touched all are quickly sensitive; and the least hurt to the little finger of the State runs
through the whole body and vibrates to the soul. For the true State, like an individual, is
injured as a whole when any part is affected. Every State has subjects and rulers, who in
a democracy are called rulers, and in other States masters: but in our State they are
called saviours and allies; and the subjects who in other States are termed slaves, are by
us termed nurturers and paymasters, and those who are termed comrades and
colleagues in other places, are by us called fathers and brothers. And whereas in other
States members of the same government regard one of their colleagues as a friend and
another as an enemy, in our State no man is a stranger to another; for every citizen is
connected with every other by ties of blood, and these names and this way of speaking
will have a corresponding reality—brother, father, sister, mother, repeated from infancy
in the ears of children, will not be mere words. Then again the citizens will have all
things in common, in having common property they will have common pleasures and
pains.
Can there be strife and contention among those who are of one mind; or lawsuits about
property when men have nothing but their bodies which they call their own; or suits
about violence when every one is bound to defend himself? The permission to strike
when insulted will be an ‘antidote’ to the knife and will prevent disturbances in the
State. But no younger man will strike an elder; reverence will prevent him from laying
hands on his kindred, and he will fear that the rest of the family may retaliate. Moreover,
our citizens will be rid of the lesser evils of life; there will be no flattery of the rich, no
sordid household cares, no borrowing and not paying. Compared with the citizens of
other States, ours will be Olympic victors, and crowned with blessings greater still—they
and their children having a better maintenance during life, and after death an
honourable burial. Nor has the happiness of the individual been sacrificed to the
happiness of the State; our Olympic victor has not been turned into a cobbler, but he
has a happiness beyond that of any cobbler. At the same time, if any conceited youth
begins to dream of appropriating the State to himself, he must be reminded that ‘half is
better than the whole.’ ‘I should certainly advise him to stay where he is when he has the
promise of such a brave life.’
But is such a community possible?—as among the animals, so also among men; and if
possible, in what way possible? About war there is no difficulty; the principle of
communism is adapted to military service. Parents will take their children to look on at a
battle, just as potters’ boys are trained to the business by looking on at the wheel. And
to the parents themselves, as to other animals, the sight of their young ones will prove a
great incentive to bravery. Young warriors must learn, but they must not run into
danger, although a certain degree of risk is worth incurring when the benefit is great.
The young creatures should be placed under the care of experienced veterans, and they
should have wings—that is to say, swift and tractable steeds on which they may fly away
and escape. One of the first things to be done is to teach a youth to ride.
Cowards and deserters shall be degraded to the class of husbandmen; gentlemen who
allow themselves to be taken prisoners, may be presented to the enemy. But what shall
be done to the hero? First of all he shall be crowned by all the youths in the army;
secondly, he shall receive the right hand of fellowship; and thirdly, do you think that
there is any harm in his being kissed? We have already determined that he shall have
more wives than others, in order that he may have as many children as possible. And at
a feast he shall have more to eat; we have the authority of Homer for honouring brave
men with ‘long chines,’ which is an appropriate compliment, because meat is a very
strengthening thing. Fill the bowl then, and give the best seats and meats to the brave—
may they do them good! And he who dies in battle will be at once declared to be of the
golden race, and will, as we believe, become one of Hesiod’s guardian angels. He shall
be worshipped after death in the manner prescribed by the oracle; and not only he, but
all other benefactors of the State who die in any other way, shall be admitted to the
same honours.
The next question is, How shall we treat our enemies? Shall Hellenes be enslaved? No;
for there is too great a risk of the whole race passing under the yoke of the barbarians.
Or shall the dead be despoiled? Certainly not; for that sort of thing is an excuse for
skulking, and has been the ruin of many an army. There is meanness and feminine
malice in making an enemy of the dead body, when the soul which was the owner has
fled—like a dog who cannot reach his assailants, and quarrels with the stones which are
thrown at him instead. Again, the arms of Hellenes should not be offered up in the
temples of the Gods; they are a pollution, for they are taken from brethren. And on
similar grounds there should be a limit to the devastation of Hellenic territory—the
houses should not be burnt, nor more than the annual produce carried off. For war is of
two kinds, civil and foreign; the first of which is properly termed ‘discord,’ and only the
second ‘war;’ and war between Hellenes is in reality civil war—a quarrel in a family,
which is ever to be regarded as unpatriotic and unnatural, and ought to be prosecuted
with a view to reconciliation in a true phil-Hellenic spirit, as of those who would chasten
but not utterly enslave. The war is not against a whole nation who are a friendly
multitude of men, women, and children, but only against a few guilty persons; when
they are punished peace will be restored. That is the way in which Hellenes should war
against one another—and against barbarians, as they war against one another now.
‘But, my dear Socrates, you are forgetting the main question: Is such a State possible? I
grant all and more than you say about the blessedness of being one family—fathers,
brothers, mothers, daughters, going out to war together; but I want to ascertain the
possibility of this ideal State.’ You are too unmerciful. The first wave and the second
wave I have hardly escaped, and now you will certainly drown me with the third. When
you see the towering crest of the wave, I expect you to take pity. ‘Not a whit.’
Well, then, we were led to form our ideal polity in the search after justice, and the just
man answered to the just State. Is this ideal at all the worse for being impracticable?
Would the picture of a perfectly beautiful man be any the worse because no such man
ever lived? Can any reality come up to the idea? Nature will not allow words to be fully
realized; but if I am to try and realize the ideal of the State in a measure, I think that an
approach may be made to the perfection of which I dream by one or two, I do not say
slight, but possible changes in the present constitution of States. I would reduce them to
a single one—the great wave, as I call it. Until, then, kings are philosophers, or
philosophers are kings, cities will never cease from ill: no, nor the human race; nor will
our ideal polity ever come into being. I know that this is a hard saying, which few will be
able to receive. ‘Socrates, all the world will take off his coat and rush upon you with
sticks and stones, and therefore I would advise you to prepare an answer.’ You got me
into the scrape, I said. ‘And I was right,’ he replied; ‘however, I will stand by you as a sort
of do-nothing, well-meaning ally.’ Having the help of such a champion, I will do my best
to maintain my position. And first, I must explain of whom I speak and what sort of
natures these are who are to be philosophers and rulers. As you are a man of pleasure,
you will not have forgotten how indiscriminate lovers are in their attachments; they love
all, and turn blemishes into beauties. The snub-nosed youth is said to have a winning
grace; the beak of another has a royal look; the featureless are faultless; the dark are
manly, the fair angels; the sickly have a new term of endearment invented expressly for
them, which is ‘honey-pale.’ Lovers of wine and lovers of ambition also desire the
objects of their affection in every form. Now here comes the point:—The philosopher
too is a lover of knowledge in every form; he has an insatiable curiosity. ‘But will
curiosity make a philosopher? Are the lovers of sights and sounds, who let out their ears
to every chorus at the Dionysiac festivals, to be called philosophers?’ They are not true
philosophers, but only an imitation. ‘Then how are we to describe the true?’
You would acknowledge the existence of abstract ideas, such as justice, beauty, good,
evil, which are severally one, yet in their various combinations appear to be many. Those
who recognize these realities are philosophers; whereas the other class hear sounds and
see colours, and understand their use in the arts, but cannot attain to the true or waking
vision of absolute justice or beauty or truth; they have not the light of knowledge, but of
opinion, and what they see is a dream only. Perhaps he of whom we say the last will be
angry with us; can we pacify him without revealing the disorder of his mind? Suppose
we say that, if he has knowledge we rejoice to hear it, but knowledge must be of
something which is, as ignorance is of something which is not; and there is a third thing,
which both is and is not, and is matter of opinion only. Opinion and knowledge, then,
having distinct objects, must also be distinct faculties. And by faculties I mean powers
unseen and distinguishable only by the difference in their objects, as opinion and
knowledge differ, since the one is liable to err, but the other is unerring and is the
mightiest of all our faculties. If being is the object of knowledge, and not-being of
ignorance, and these are the extremes, opinion must lie between them, and may be
called darker than the one and brighter than the other. This intermediate or contingent
matter is and is not at the same time, and partakes both of existence and of nonexistence.
Now I would ask my good friend, who denies abstract beauty and justice, and
affirms a many beautiful and a many just, whether everything he sees is not in some
point of view different—the beautiful ugly, the pious impious, the just unjust? Is not the
double also the half, and are not heavy and light relative terms which pass into one
another? Everything is and is not, as in the old riddle—‘A man and not a man shot and
did not shoot a bird and not a bird with a stone and not a stone.’ The mind cannot be
fixed on either alternative; and these ambiguous, intermediate, erring, half-lighted
objects, which have a disorderly movement in the region between being and not-being,
are the proper matter of opinion, as the immutable objects are the proper matter of
knowledge. And he who grovels in the world of sense, and has only this uncertain
perception of things, is not a philosopher, but a lover of opinion only...
The fifth book is the new beginning of the Republic, in which the community of property
and of family are first maintained, and the transition is made to the kingdom of
philosophers. For both of these Plato, after his manner, has been preparing in some
chance words of Book IV, which fall unperceived on the reader’s mind, as they are
supposed at first to have fallen on the ear of Glaucon and Adeimantus. The ‘paradoxes,’
as Morgenstern terms them, of this book of the Republic will be reserved for another
place; a few remarks on the style, and some explanations of difficulties, may be briefly
added.
First, there is the image of the waves, which serves for a sort of scheme or plan of the
book. The first wave, the second wave, the third and greatest wave come rolling in, and
we hear the roar of them. All that can be said of the extravagance of Plato’s proposals is
anticipated by himself. Nothing is more admirable than the hesitation with which he
proposes the solemn text, ‘Until kings are philosophers,’ etc.; or the reaction from the
sublime to the ridiculous, when Glaucon describes the manner in which the new truth
will be received by mankind.
Some defects and difficulties may be noted in the execution of the communistic plan.
Nothing is told us of the application of communism to the lower classes; nor is the table
of prohibited degrees capable of being made out. It is quite possible that a child born at
one hymeneal festival may marry one of its own brothers or sisters, or even one of its
parents, at another. Plato is afraid of incestuous unions, but at the same time he does
not wish to bring before us the fact that the city would be divided into families of those
born seven and nine months after each hymeneal festival. If it were worth while to argue
seriously about such fancies, we might remark that while all the old affinities are
abolished, the newly prohibited affinity rests not on any natural or rational principle, but
only upon the accident of children having been born in the same month and year. Nor
does he explain how the lots could be so manipulated by the legislature as to bring
together the fairest and best. The singular expression which is employed to describe the
age of five-and-twenty may perhaps be taken from some poet.
In the delineation of the philosopher, the illustrations of the nature of philosophy
derived from love are more suited to the apprehension of Glaucon, the Athenian man of
pleasure, than to modern tastes or feelings. They are partly facetious, but also contain a
germ of truth. That science is a whole, remains a true principle of inductive as well as of
metaphysical philosophy; and the love of universal knowledge is still the characteristic of
the philosopher in modern as well as in ancient times.
At the end of the fifth book Plato introduces the figment of contingent matter, which
has exercised so great an influence both on the Ethics and Theology of the modern
world, and which occurs here for the first time in the history of philosophy. He did not
remark that the degrees of knowledge in the subject have nothing corresponding to
them in the object. With him a word must answer to an idea; and he could not conceive
of an opinion which was an opinion about nothing. The influence of analogy led him to
invent ‘parallels and conjugates’ and to overlook facts. To us some of his difficulties are
puzzling only from their simplicity: we do not perceive that the answer to them ‘is
tumbling out at our feet.’ To the mind of early thinkers, the conception of not-being was
dark and mysterious; they did not see that this terrible apparition which threatened
destruction to all knowledge was only a logical determination. The common term under
which, through the accidental use of language, two entirely different ideas were
included was another source of confusion. Thus through the ambiguity of (Greek) Plato,
attempting to introduce order into the first chaos of human thought, seems to have
confused perception and opinion, and to have failed to distinguish the contingent from
the relative. In the Theaetetus the first of these difficulties begins to clear up; in the
Sophist the second; and for this, as well as for other reasons, both these dialogues are
probably to be regarded as later than the Republic.
BOOK VI.
Having determined that the many have no knowledge of true being, and have no clear
patterns in their minds of justice, beauty, truth, and that philosophers have such
patterns, we have now to ask whether they or the many shall be rulers in our State. But
who can doubt that philosophers should be chosen, if they have the other qualities
which are required in a ruler? For they are lovers of the knowledge of the eternal and of
all truth; they are haters of falsehood; their meaner desires are absorbed in the interests
of knowledge; they are spectators of all time and all existence; and in the magnificence
of their contemplation the life of man is as nothing to them, nor is death fearful. Also
they are of a social, gracious disposition, equally free from cowardice and arrogance.
They learn and remember easily; they have harmonious, well-regulated minds; truth
flows to them sweetly by nature. Can the god of Jealousy himself find any fault with
such an assemblage of good qualities?
Here Adeimantus interposes:—‘No man can answer you, Socrates; but every man feels
that this is owing to his own deficiency in argument. He is driven from one position to
another, until he has nothing more to say, just as an unskilful player at draughts is
reduced to his last move by a more skilled opponent. And yet all the time he may be
right. He may know, in this very instance, that those who make philosophy the business
of their lives, generally turn out rogues if they are bad men, and fools if they are good.
What do you say?’ I should say that he is quite right. ‘Then how is such an admission
reconcileable with the doctrine that philosophers should be kings?’
I shall answer you in a parable which will also let you see how poor a hand I am at the
invention of allegories. The relation of good men to their governments is so peculiar,
that in order to defend them I must take an illustration from the world of fiction.
Conceive the captain of a ship, taller by a head and shoulders than any of the crew, yet a
little deaf, a little blind, and rather ignorant of the seaman’s art. The sailors want to steer,
although they know nothing of the art; and they have a theory that it cannot be learned.
If the helm is refused them, they drug the captain’s posset, bind him hand and foot, and
take possession of the ship. He who joins in the mutiny is termed a good pilot and what
not; they have no conception that the true pilot must observe the winds and the stars,
and must be their master, whether they like it or not;—such an one would be called by
them fool, prater, star-gazer. This is my parable; which I will beg you to interpret for me
to those gentlemen who ask why the philosopher has such an evil name, and to explain
to them that not he, but those who will not use him, are to blame for his uselessness.
The philosopher should not beg of mankind to be put in authority over them. The wise
man should not seek the rich, as the proverb bids, but every man, whether rich or poor,
must knock at the door of the physician when he has need of him. Now the pilot is the
philosopher—he whom in the parable they call star-gazer, and the mutinous sailors are
the mob of politicians by whom he is rendered useless. Not that these are the worst
enemies of philosophy, who is far more dishonoured by her own professing sons when
they are corrupted by the world. Need I recall the original image of the philosopher? Did
we not say of him just now, that he loved truth and hated falsehood, and that he could
not rest in the multiplicity of phenomena, but was led by a sympathy in his own nature
to the contemplation of the absolute? All the virtues as well as truth, who is the leader
of them, took up their abode in his soul. But as you were observing, if we turn aside to
view the reality, we see that the persons who were thus described, with the exception of
a small and useless class, are utter rogues.
The point which has to be considered, is the origin of this corruption in nature. Every
one will admit that the philosopher, in our description of him, is a rare being. But what
numberless causes tend to destroy these rare beings! There is no good thing which may
not be a cause of evil— health, wealth, strength, rank, and the virtues themselves, when
placed under unfavourable circumstances. For as in the animal or vegetable world the
strongest seeds most need the accompaniment of good air and soil, so the best of
human characters turn out the worst when they fall upon an unsuitable soil; whereas
weak natures hardly ever do any considerable good or harm; they are not the stuff out
of which either great criminals or great heroes are made. The philosopher follows the
same analogy: he is either the best or the worst of all men. Some persons say that the
Sophists are the corrupters of youth; but is not public opinion the real Sophist who is
everywhere present—in those very persons, in the assembly, in the courts, in the camp,
in the applauses and hisses of the theatre re-echoed by the surrounding hills? Will not a
young man’s heart leap amid these discordant sounds? and will any education save him
from being carried away by the torrent? Nor is this all. For if he will not yield to opinion,
there follows the gentle compulsion of exile or death. What principle of rival Sophists or
anybody else can overcome in such an unequal contest? Characters there may be more
than human, who are exceptions—God may save a man, but not his own strength.
Further, I would have you consider that the hireling Sophist only gives back to the world
their own opinions; he is the keeper of the monster, who knows how to flatter or anger
him, and observes the meaning of his inarticulate grunts. Good is what pleases him, evil
what he dislikes; truth and beauty are determined only by the taste of the brute. Such is
the Sophist’s wisdom, and such is the condition of those who make public opinion the
test of truth, whether in art or in morals. The curse is laid upon them of being and doing
what it approves, and when they attempt first principles the failure is ludicrous. Think of
all this and ask yourself whether the world is more likely to be a believer in the unity of
the idea, or in the multiplicity of phenomena. And the world if not a believer in the idea
cannot be a philosopher, and must therefore be a persecutor of philosophers. There is
another evil:—the world does not like to lose the gifted nature, and so they flatter the
young (Alcibiades) into a magnificent opinion of his own capacity; the tall, proper youth
begins to expand, and is dreaming of kingdoms and empires. If at this instant a friend
whispers to him, ‘Now the gods lighten thee; thou art a great fool’ and must be
educated—do you think that he will listen? Or suppose a better sort of man who is
attracted towards philosophy, will they not make Herculean efforts to spoil and corrupt
him? Are we not right in saying that the love of knowledge, no less than riches, may
divert him? Men of this class (Critias) often become politicians—they are the authors of
great mischief in states, and sometimes also of great good. And thus philosophy is
deserted by her natural protectors, and others enter in and dishonour her. Vulgar little
minds see the land open and rush from the prisons of the arts into her temple. A clever
mechanic having a soul coarse as his body, thinks that he will gain caste by becoming
her suitor. For philosophy, even in her fallen estate, has a dignity of her own—and he,
like a bald little blacksmith’s apprentice as he is, having made some money and got out
of durance, washes and dresses himself as a bridegroom and marries his master’s
daughter. What will be the issue of such marriages? Will they not be vile and bastard,
devoid of truth and nature? ‘They will.’ Small, then, is the remnant of genuine
philosophers; there may be a few who are citizens of small states, in which politics are
not worth thinking of, or who have been detained by Theages’ bridle of ill health; for my
own case of the oracular sign is almost unique, and too rare to be worth mentioning.
And these few when they have tasted the pleasures of philosophy, and have taken a
look at that den of thieves and place of wild beasts, which is human life, will stand aside
from the storm under the shelter of a wall, and try to preserve their own innocence and
to depart in peace. ‘A great work, too, will have been accomplished by them.’ Great, yes,
but not the greatest; for man is a social being, and can only attain his highest
development in the society which is best suited to him.
Enough, then, of the causes why philosophy has such an evil name. Another question is,
Which of existing states is suited to her? Not one of them; at present she is like some
exotic seed which degenerates in a strange soil; only in her proper state will she be
shown to be of heavenly growth. ‘And is her proper state ours or some other?’ Ours in
all points but one, which was left undetermined. You may remember our saying that
some living mind or witness of the legislator was needed in states. But we were afraid to
enter upon a subject of such difficulty, and now the question recurs and has not grown
easier:—How may philosophy be safely studied? Let us bring her into the light of day,
and make an end of the inquiry.
In the first place, I say boldly that nothing can be worse than the present mode of study.
Persons usually pick up a little philosophy in early youth, and in the intervals of business,
but they never master the real difficulty, which is dialectic. Later, perhaps, they
occasionally go to a lecture on philosophy. Years advance, and the sun of philosophy,
unlike that of Heracleitus, sets never to rise again. This order of education should be
reversed; it should begin with gymnastics in youth, and as the man strengthens, he
should increase the gymnastics of his soul. Then, when active life is over, let him finally
return to philosophy. ‘You are in earnest, Socrates, but the world will be equally earnest
in withstanding you—no more than Thrasymachus.’ Do not make a quarrel between
Thrasymachus and me, who were never enemies and are now good friends enough. And
I shall do my best to convince him and all mankind of the truth of my words, or at any
rate to prepare for the future when, in another life, we may again take part in similar
discussions. ‘That will be a long time hence.’ Not long in comparison with eternity. The
many will probably remain incredulous, for they have never seen the natural unity of
ideas, but only artificial juxtapositions; not free and generous thoughts, but tricks of
controversy and quips of law;—a perfect man ruling in a perfect state, even a single one
they have not known. And we foresaw that there was no chance of perfection either in
states or individuals until a necessity was laid upon philosophers—not the rogues, but
those whom we called the useless class—of holding office; or until the sons of kings
were inspired with a true love of philosophy. Whether in the infinity of past time there
has been, or is in some distant land, or ever will be hereafter, an ideal such as we have
described, we stoutly maintain that there has been, is, and will be such a state whenever
the Muse of philosophy rules. Will you say that the world is of another mind? O, my
friend, do not revile the world! They will soon change their opinion if they are gently
entreated, and are taught the true nature of the philosopher. Who can hate a man who
loves him? Or be jealous of one who has no jealousy? Consider, again, that the many
hate not the true but the false philosophers—the pretenders who force their way in
without invitation, and are always speaking of persons and not of principles, which is
unlike the spirit of philosophy. For the true philosopher despises earthly strife; his eye is
fixed on the eternal order in accordance with which he moulds himself into the Divine
image (and not himself only, but other men), and is the creator of the virtues private as
well as public. When mankind see that the happiness of states is only to be found in that
image, will they be angry with us for attempting to delineate it? ‘Certainly not. But what
will be the process of delineation?’ The artist will do nothing until he has made a tabula
rasa; on this he will inscribe the constitution of a state, glancing often at the divine truth
of nature, and from that deriving the godlike among men, mingling the two elements,
rubbing out and painting in, until there is a perfect harmony or fusion of the divine and
human. But perhaps the world will doubt the existence of such an artist. What will they
doubt? That the philosopher is a lover of truth, having a nature akin to the best?—and if
they admit this will they still quarrel with us for making philosophers our kings? ‘They
will be less disposed to quarrel.’ Let us assume then that they are pacified. Still, a person
may hesitate about the probability of the son of a king being a philosopher. And we do
not deny that they are very liable to be corrupted; but yet surely in the course of ages
there might be one exception—and one is enough. If one son of a king were a
philosopher, and had obedient citizens, he might bring the ideal polity into being.
Hence we conclude that our laws are not only the best, but that they are also possible,
though not free from difficulty.
I gained nothing by evading the troublesome questions which arose concerning women
and children. I will be wiser now and acknowledge that we must go to the bottom of
another question: What is to be the education of our guardians? It was agreed that they
were to be lovers of their country, and were to be tested in the refiner’s fire of pleasures
and pains, and those who came forth pure and remained fixed in their principles were to
have honours and rewards in life and after death. But at this point, the argument put on
her veil and turned into another path. I hesitated to make the assertion which I now
hazard,—that our guardians must be philosophers. You remember all the contradictory
elements, which met in the philosopher— how difficult to find them all in a single
person! Intelligence and spirit are not often combined with steadiness; the stolid,
fearless, nature is averse to intellectual toil. And yet these opposite elements are all
necessary, and therefore, as we were saying before, the aspirant must be tested in
pleasures and dangers; and also, as we must now further add, in the highest branches of
knowledge. You will remember, that when we spoke of the virtues mention was made of
a longer road, which you were satisfied to leave unexplored. ‘Enough seemed to have
been said.’ Enough, my friend; but what is enough while anything remains wanting? Of
all men the guardian must not faint in the search after truth; he must be prepared to
take the longer road, or he will never reach that higher region which is above the four
virtues; and of the virtues too he must not only get an outline, but a clear and distinct
vision. (Strange that we should be so precise about trifles, so careless about the highest
truths!) ‘And what are the highest?’ You to pretend unconsciousness, when you have so
often heard me speak of the idea of good, about which we know so little, and without
which though a man gain the world he has no profit of it! Some people imagine that the
good is wisdom; but this involves a circle,—the good, they say, is wisdom, wisdom has
to do with the good. According to others the good is pleasure; but then comes the
absurdity that good is bad, for there are bad pleasures as well as good. Again, the good
must have reality; a man may desire the appearance of virtue, but he will not desire the
appearance of good. Ought our guardians then to be ignorant of this supreme principle,
of which every man has a presentiment, and without which no man has any real
knowledge of anything? ‘But, Socrates, what is this supreme principle, knowledge or
pleasure, or what? You may think me troublesome, but I say that you have no business
to be always repeating the doctrines of others instead of giving us your own.’ Can I say
what I do not know? ‘You may offer an opinion.’ And will the blindness and crookedness
of opinion content you when you might have the light and certainty of science? ‘I will
only ask you to give such an explanation of the good as you have given already of
temperance and justice.’ I wish that I could, but in my present mood I cannot reach to
the height of the knowledge of the good. To the parent or principal I cannot introduce
you, but to the child begotten in his image, which I may compare with the interest on
the principal, I will. (Audit the account, and do not let me give you a false statement of
the debt.) You remember our old distinction of the many beautiful and the one
beautiful, the particular and the universal, the objects of sight and the objects of
thought? Did you ever consider that the objects of sight imply a faculty of sight which is
the most complex and costly of our senses, requiring not only objects of sense, but also
a medium, which is light; without which the sight will not distinguish between colours
and all will be a blank? For light is the noble bond between the perceiving faculty and
the thing perceived, and the god who gives us light is the sun, who is the eye of the day,
but is not to be confounded with the eye of man. This eye of the day or sun is what I call
the child of the good, standing in the same relation to the visible world as the good to
the intellectual. When the sun shines the eye sees, and in the intellectual world where
truth is, there is sight and light. Now that which is the sun of intelligent natures, is the
idea of good, the cause of knowledge and truth, yet other and fairer than they are, and
standing in the same relation to them in which the sun stands to light. O inconceivable
height of beauty, which is above knowledge and above truth! (‘You cannot surely mean
pleasure,’ he said. Peace, I replied.) And this idea of good, like the sun, is also the cause
of growth, and the author not of knowledge only, but of being, yet greater far than
either in dignity and power. ‘That is a reach of thought more than human; but, pray, go
on with the image, for I suspect that there is more behind.’ There is, I said; and bearing
in mind our two suns or principles, imagine further their corresponding worlds—one of
the visible, the other of the intelligible; you may assist your fancy by figuring the
distinction under the image of a line divided into two unequal parts, and may again
subdivide each part into two lesser segments representative of the stages of knowledge
in either sphere. The lower portion of the lower or visible sphere will consist of shadows
and reflections, and its upper and smaller portion will contain real objects in the world
of nature or of art. The sphere of the intelligible will also have two divisions,—one of
mathematics, in which there is no ascent but all is descent; no inquiring into premises,
but only drawing of inferences. In this division the mind works with figures and
numbers, the images of which are taken not from the shadows, but from the objects,
although the truth of them is seen only with the mind’s eye; and they are used as
hypotheses without being analysed. Whereas in the other division reason uses the
hypotheses as stages or steps in the ascent to the idea of good, to which she fastens
them, and then again descends, walking firmly in the region of ideas, and of ideas only,
in her ascent as well as descent, and finally resting in them. ‘I partly understand,’ he
replied; ‘you mean that the ideas of science are superior to the hypothetical,
metaphorical conceptions of geometry and the other arts or sciences, whichever is to be
the name of them; and the latter conceptions you refuse to make subjects of pure
intellect, because they have no first principle, although when resting on a first principle,
they pass into the higher sphere.’ You understand me very well, I said. And now to those
four divisions of knowledge you may assign four corresponding faculties—pure
intelligence to the highest sphere; active intelligence to the second; to the third, faith; to
the fourth, the perception of shadows—and the clearness of the several faculties will be
in the same ratio as the truth of the objects to which they are related...
Like Socrates, we may recapitulate the virtues of the philosopher. In language which
seems to reach beyond the horizon of that age and country, he is described as ‘the
spectator of all time and all existence.’ He has the noblest gifts of nature, and makes the
highest use of them. All his desires are absorbed in the love of wisdom, which is the love
of truth. None of the graces of a beautiful soul are wanting in him; neither can he fear
death, or think much of human life. The ideal of modern times hardly retains the
simplicity of the antique; there is not the same originality either in truth or error which
characterized the Greeks. The philosopher is no longer living in the unseen, nor is he
sent by an oracle to convince mankind of ignorance; nor does he regard knowledge as a
system of ideas leading upwards by regular stages to the idea of good. The eagerness of
the pursuit has abated; there is more division of labour and less of comprehensive
reflection upon nature and human life as a whole; more of exact observation and less of
anticipation and inspiration. Still, in the altered conditions of knowledge, the parallel is
not wholly lost; and there may be a use in translating the conception of Plato into the
language of our own age. The philosopher in modern times is one who fixes his mind on
the laws of nature in their sequence and connexion, not on fragments or pictures of
nature; on history, not on controversy; on the truths which are acknowledged by the
few, not on the opinions of the many. He is aware of the importance of ‘classifying
according to nature,’ and will try to ‘separate the limbs of science without breaking
them’ (Phaedr.). There is no part of truth, whether great or small, which he will
dishonour; and in the least things he will discern the greatest (Parmen.). Like the ancient
philosopher he sees the world pervaded by analogies, but he can also tell ‘why in some
cases a single instance is sufficient for an induction’ (Mill’s Logic), while in other cases a
thousand examples would prove nothing. He inquires into a portion of knowledge only,
because the whole has grown too vast to be embraced by a single mind or life. He has a
clearer conception of the divisions of science and of their relation to the mind of man
than was possible to the ancients. Like Plato, he has a vision of the unity of knowledge,
not as the beginning of philosophy to be attained by a study of elementary
mathematics, but as the far-off result of the working of many minds in many ages. He is
aware that mathematical studies are preliminary to almost every other; at the same time,
he will not reduce all varieties of knowledge to the type of mathematics. He too must
have a nobility of character, without which genius loses the better half of greatness.
Regarding the world as a point in immensity, and each individual as a link in a neverending
chain of existence, he will not think much of his own life, or be greatly afraid of
death.
Adeimantus objects first of all to the form of the Socratic reasoning, thus showing that
Plato is aware of the imperfection of his own method. He brings the accusation against
himself which might be brought against him by a modern logician—that he extracts the
answer because he knows how to put the question. In a long argument words are apt to
change their meaning slightly, or premises may be assumed or conclusions inferred with
rather too much certainty or universality; the variation at each step may be unobserved,
and yet at last the divergence becomes considerable. Hence the failure of attempts to
apply arithmetical or algebraic formulae to logic. The imperfection, or rather the higher
and more elastic nature of language, does not allow words to have the precision of
numbers or of symbols. And this quality in language impairs the force of an argument
which has many steps.
The objection, though fairly met by Socrates in this particular instance, may be regarded
as implying a reflection upon the Socratic mode of reasoning. And here, as elsewhere,
Plato seems to intimate that the time had come when the negative and interrogative
method of Socrates must be superseded by a positive and constructive one, of which
examples are given in some of the later dialogues. Adeimantus further argues that the
ideal is wholly at variance with facts; for experience proves philosophers to be either
useless or rogues. Contrary to all expectation Socrates has no hesitation in admitting the
truth of this, and explains the anomaly in an allegory, first characteristically depreciating
his own inventive powers. In this allegory the people are distinguished from the
professional politicians, and, as elsewhere, are spoken of in a tone of pity rather than of
censure under the image of ‘the noble captain who is not very quick in his perceptions.’
The uselessness of philosophers is explained by the circumstance that mankind will not
use them. The world in all ages has been divided between contempt and fear of those
who employ the power of ideas and know no other weapons. Concerning the false
philosopher, Socrates argues that the best is most liable to corruption; and that the finer
nature is more likely to suffer from alien conditions. We too observe that there are some
kinds of excellence which spring from a peculiar delicacy of constitution; as is evidently
true of the poetical and imaginative temperament, which often seems to depend on
impressions, and hence can only breathe or live in a certain atmosphere. The man of
genius has greater pains and greater pleasures, greater powers and greater weaknesses,
and often a greater play of character than is to be found in ordinary men. He can
assume the disguise of virtue or disinterestedness without having them, or veil personal
enmity in the language of patriotism and philosophy,—he can say the word which all
men are thinking, he has an insight which is terrible into the follies and weaknesses of
his fellow-men. An Alcibiades, a Mirabeau, or a Napoleon the First, are born either to be
the authors of great evils in states, or ‘of great good, when they are drawn in that
direction.’
Yet the thesis, ‘corruptio optimi pessima,’ cannot be maintained generally or without
regard to the kind of excellence which is corrupted. The alien conditions which are
corrupting to one nature, may be the elements of culture to another. In general a man
can only receive his highest development in a congenial state or family, among friends
or fellow-workers. But also he may sometimes be stirred by adverse circumstances to
such a degree that he rises up against them and reforms them. And while weaker or
coarser characters will extract good out of evil, say in a corrupt state of the church or of
society, and live on happily, allowing the evil to remain, the finer or stronger natures
may be crushed or spoiled by surrounding influences—may become misanthrope and
philanthrope by turns; or in a few instances, like the founders of the monastic orders, or
the Reformers, owing to some peculiarity in themselves or in their age, may break away
entirely from the world and from the church, sometimes into great good, sometimes
into great evil, sometimes into both. And the same holds in the lesser sphere of a
convent, a school, a family.
Plato would have us consider how easily the best natures are overpowered by public
opinion, and what efforts the rest of mankind will make to get possession of them. The
world, the church, their own profession, any political or party organization, are always
carrying them off their legs and teaching them to apply high and holy names to their
own prejudices and interests. The ‘monster’ corporation to which they belong judges
right and truth to be the pleasure of the community. The individual becomes one with
his order; or, if he resists, the world is too much for him, and will sooner or later be
revenged on him. This is, perhaps, a one-sided but not wholly untrue picture of the
maxims and practice of mankind when they ‘sit down together at an assembly,’ either in
ancient or modern times.
When the higher natures are corrupted by politics, the lower take possession of the
vacant place of philosophy. This is described in one of those continuous images in which
the argument, to use a Platonic expression, ‘veils herself,’ and which is dropped and
reappears at intervals. The question is asked,—Why are the citizens of states so hostile
to philosophy? The answer is, that they do not know her. And yet there is also a better
mind of the many; they would believe if they were taught. But hitherto they have only
known a conventional imitation of philosophy, words without thoughts, systems which
have no life in them; a (divine) person uttering the words of beauty and freedom, the
friend of man holding communion with the Eternal, and seeking to frame the state in
that image, they have never known. The same double feeling respecting the mass of
mankind has always existed among men. The first thought is that the people are the
enemies of truth and right; the second, that this only arises out of an accidental error
and confusion, and that they do not really hate those who love them, if they could be
educated to know them.
In the latter part of the sixth book, three questions have to be considered: 1st, the
nature of the longer and more circuitous way, which is contrasted with the shorter and
more imperfect method of Book IV; 2nd, the heavenly pattern or idea of the state; 3rd,
the relation of the divisions of knowledge to one another and to the corresponding
faculties of the soul
1. Of the higher method of knowledge in Plato we have only a glimpse. Neither here nor
in the Phaedrus or Symposium, nor yet in the Philebus or Sophist, does he give any clear
explanation of his meaning. He would probably have described his method as
proceeding by regular steps to a system of universal knowledge, which inferred the
parts from the whole rather than the whole from the parts. This ideal logic is not
practised by him in the search after justice, or in the analysis of the parts of the soul;
there, like Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues from experience and the
common use of language. But at the end of the sixth book he conceives another and
more perfect method, in which all ideas are only steps or grades or moments of
thought, forming a connected whole which is self-supporting, and in which consistency
is the test of truth. He does not explain to us in detail the nature of the process. Like
many other thinkers both in ancient and modern times his mind seems to be filled with
a vacant form which he is unable to realize. He supposes the sciences to have a natural
order and connexion in an age when they can hardly be said to exist. He is hastening on
to the ‘end of the intellectual world’ without even making a beginning of them.
In modern times we hardly need to be reminded that the process of acquiring
knowledge is here confused with the contemplation of absolute knowledge. In all
science a priori and a posteriori truths mingle in various proportions. The a priori part is
that which is derived from the most universal experience of men, or is universally
accepted by them; the a posteriori is that which grows up around the more general
principles and becomes imperceptibly one with them. But Plato erroneously imagines
that the synthesis is separable from the analysis, and that the method of science can
anticipate science. In entertaining such a vision of a priori knowledge he is sufficiently
justified, or at least his meaning may be sufficiently explained by the similar attempts of
Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and even of Bacon himself, in modern philosophy. Anticipations
or divinations, or prophetic glimpses of truths whether concerning man or nature, seem
to stand in the same relation to ancient philosophy which hypotheses bear to modern
inductive science. These ‘guesses at truth’ were not made at random; they arose from a
superficial impression of uniformities and first principles in nature which the genius of
the Greek, contemplating the expanse of heaven and earth, seemed to recognize in the
distance. Nor can we deny that in ancient times knowledge must have stood still, and
the human mind been deprived of the very instruments of thought, if philosophy had
been strictly confined to the results of experience.
2. Plato supposes that when the tablet has been made blank the artist will fill in the
lineaments of the ideal state. Is this a pattern laid up in heaven, or mere vacancy on
which he is supposed to gaze with wondering eye? The answer is, that such ideals are
framed partly by the omission of particulars, partly by imagination perfecting the form
which experience supplies (Phaedo). Plato represents these ideals in a figure as
belonging to another world; and in modern times the idea will sometimes seem to
precede, at other times to co-operate with the hand of the artist. As in science, so also in
creative art, there is a synthetical as well as an analytical method. One man will have the
whole in his mind before he begins; to another the processes of mind and hand will be
simultaneous.
3. There is no difficulty in seeing that Plato’s divisions of knowledge are based, first, on
the fundamental antithesis of sensible and intellectual which pervades the whole preSocratic
philosophy; in which is implied also the opposition of the permanent and
transient, of the universal and particular. But the age of philosophy in which he lived
seemed to require a further distinction;—numbers and figures were beginning to
separate from ideas. The world could no longer regard justice as a cube, and was
learning to see, though imperfectly, that the abstractions of sense were distinct from the
abstractions of mind. Between the Eleatic being or essence and the shadows of
phenomena, the Pythagorean principle of number found a place, and was, as Aristotle
remarks, a conducting medium from one to the other. Hence Plato is led to introduce a
third term which had not hitherto entered into the scheme of his philosophy. He had
observed the use of mathematics in education; they were the best preparation for
higher studies. The subjective relation between them further suggested an objective
one; although the passage from one to the other is really imaginary (Metaph.). For
metaphysical and moral philosophy has no connexion with mathematics; number and
figure are the abstractions of time and space, not the expressions of purely intellectual
conceptions. When divested of metaphor, a straight line or a square has no more to do
with right and justice than a crooked line with vice. The figurative association was
mistaken for a real one; and thus the three latter divisions of the Platonic proportion
were constructed.
There is more difficulty in comprehending how he arrived at the first term of the series,
which is nowhere else mentioned, and has no reference to any other part of his system.
Nor indeed does the relation of shadows to objects correspond to the relation of
numbers to ideas. Probably Plato has been led by the love of analogy (Timaeus) to make
four terms instead of three, although the objects perceived in both divisions of the
lower sphere are equally objects of sense. He is also preparing the way, as his manner is,
for the shadows of images at the beginning of the seventh book, and the imitation of an
imitation in the tenth. The line may be regarded as reaching from unity to infinity, and is
divided into two unequal parts, and subdivided into two more; each lower sphere is the
multiplication of the preceding. Of the four faculties, faith in the lower division has an
intermediate position (cp. for the use of the word faith or belief, (Greek), Timaeus),
contrasting equally with the vagueness of the perception of shadows (Greek) and the
higher certainty of understanding (Greek) and reason (Greek).
The difference between understanding and mind or reason (Greek) is analogous to the
difference between acquiring knowledge in the parts and the contemplation of the
whole. True knowledge is a whole, and is at rest; consistency and universality are the
tests of truth. To this self-evidencing knowledge of the whole the faculty of mind is
supposed to correspond. But there is a knowledge of the understanding which is
incomplete and in motion always, because unable to rest in the subordinate ideas.
Those ideas are called both images and hypotheses—images because they are clothed
in sense, hypotheses because they are assumptions only, until they are brought into
connexion with the idea of good.
The general meaning of the passage, ‘Noble, then, is the bond which links together
sight...And of this kind I spoke as the intelligible...’ so far as the thought contained in it
admits of being translated into the terms of modern philosophy, may be described or
explained as follows:—There is a truth, one and self-existent, to which by the help of a
ladder let down from above, the human intelligence may ascend. This unity is like the
sun in the heavens, the light by which all things are seen, the being by which they are
created and sustained. It is the IDEA of good. And the steps of the ladder leading up to
this highest or universal existence are the mathematical sciences, which also contain in
themselves an element of the universal. These, too, we see in a new manner when we
connect them with the idea of good. They then cease to be hypotheses or pictures, and
become essential parts of a higher truth which is at once their first principle and their
final cause.
We cannot give any more precise meaning to this remarkable passage, but we may trace
in it several rudiments or vestiges of thought which are common to us and to Plato:
such as (1) the unity and correlation of the sciences, or rather of science, for in Plato’s
time they were not yet parted off or distinguished; (2) the existence of a Divine Power,
or life or idea or cause or reason, not yet conceived or no longer conceived as in the
Timaeus and elsewhere under the form of a person; (3) the recognition of the
hypothetical and conditional character of the mathematical sciences, and in a measure
of every science when isolated from the rest; (4) the conviction of a truth which is
invisible, and of a law, though hardly a law of nature, which permeates the intellectual
rather than the visible world.
The method of Socrates is hesitating and tentative, awaiting the fuller explanation of the
idea of good, and of the nature of dialectic in the seventh book. The imperfect
intelligence of Glaucon, and the reluctance of Socrates to make a beginning, mark the
difficulty of the subject. The allusion to Theages’ bridle, and to the internal oracle, or
demonic sign, of Socrates, which here, as always in Plato, is only prohibitory; the remark
that the salvation of any remnant of good in the present evil state of the world is due to
God only; the reference to a future state of existence, which is unknown to Glaucon in
the tenth book, and in which the discussions of Socrates and his disciples would be
resumed; the surprise in the answers; the fanciful irony of Socrates, where he pretends
that he can only describe the strange position of the philosopher in a figure of speech;
the original observation that the Sophists, after all, are only the representatives and not
the leaders of public opinion; the picture of the philosopher standing aside in the
shower of sleet under a wall; the figure of ‘the great beast’ followed by the expression of
good-will towards the common people who would not have rejected the philosopher if
they had known him; the ‘right noble thought’ that the highest truths demand the
greatest exactness; the hesitation of Socrates in returning once more to his well-worn
theme of the idea of good; the ludicrous earnestness of Glaucon; the comparison of
philosophy to a deserted maiden who marries beneath her—are some of the most
interesting characteristics of the sixth book.
Yet a few more words may be added, on the old theme, which was so oft discussed in
the Socratic circle, of which we, like Glaucon and Adeimantus, would fain, if possible,
have a clearer notion. Like them, we are dissatisfied when we are told that the idea of
good can only be revealed to a student of the mathematical sciences, and we are
inclined to think that neither we nor they could have been led along that path to any
satisfactory goal. For we have learned that differences of quantity cannot pass into
differences of quality, and that the mathematical sciences can never rise above
themselves into the sphere of our higher thoughts, although they may sometimes
furnish symbols and expressions of them, and may train the mind in habits of
abstraction and self-concentration. The illusion which was natural to an ancient
philosopher has ceased to be an illusion to us. But if the process by which we are
supposed to arrive at the idea of good be really imaginary, may not the idea itself be
also a mere abstraction? We remark, first, that in all ages, and especially in primitive
philosophy, words such as being, essence, unity, good, have exerted an extraordinary
influence over the minds of men. The meagreness or negativeness of their content has
been in an inverse ratio to their power. They have become the forms under which all
things were comprehended. There was a need or instinct in the human soul which they
satisfied; they were not ideas, but gods, and to this new mythology the men of a later
generation began to attach the powers and associations of the elder deities.
The idea of good is one of those sacred words or forms of thought, which were
beginning to take the place of the old mythology. It meant unity, in which all time and
all existence were gathered up. It was the truth of all things, and also the light in which
they shone forth, and became evident to intelligences human and divine. It was the
cause of all things, the power by which they were brought into being. It was the
universal reason divested of a human personality. It was the life as well as the light of
the world, all knowledge and all power were comprehended in it. The way to it was
through the mathematical sciences, and these too were dependent on it. To ask whether
God was the maker of it, or made by it, would be like asking whether God could be
conceived apart from goodness, or goodness apart from God. The God of the Timaeus is
not really at variance with the idea of good; they are aspects of the same, differing only
as the personal from the impersonal, or the masculine from the neuter, the one being
the expression or language of mythology, the other of philosophy.
This, or something like this, is the meaning of the idea of good as conceived by Plato.
Ideas of number, order, harmony, development may also be said to enter into it. The
paraphrase which has just been given of it goes beyond the actual words of Plato. We
have perhaps arrived at the stage of philosophy which enables us to understand what
he is aiming at, better than he did himself. We are beginning to realize what he saw
darkly and at a distance. But if he could have been told that this, or some conception of
the same kind, but higher than this, was the truth at which he was aiming, and the need
which he sought to supply, he would gladly have recognized that more was contained in
his own thoughts than he himself knew. As his words are few and his manner reticent
and tentative, so must the style of his interpreter be. We should not approach his
meaning more nearly by attempting to define it further. In translating him into the
language of modern thought, we might insensibly lose the spirit of ancient philosophy.
It is remarkable that although Plato speaks of the idea of good as the first principle of
truth and being, it is nowhere mentioned in his writings except in this passage. Nor did
it retain any hold upon the minds of his disciples in a later generation; it was probably
unintelligible to them. Nor does the mention of it in Aristotle appear to have any
reference to this or any other passage in his extant writings.
BOOK VII.
And now I will describe in a figure the enlightenment or unenlightenment of our
nature:—Imagine human beings living in an underground den which is open towards
the light; they have been there from childhood, having their necks and legs chained, and
can only see into the den. At a distance there is a fire, and between the fire and the
prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built along the way, like the screen over which
marionette players show their puppets. Behind the wall appear moving figures, who
hold in their hands various works of art, and among them images of men and animals,
wood and stone, and some of the passers-by are talking and others silent. ‘A strange
parable,’ he said, ‘and strange captives.’ They are ourselves, I replied; and they see only
the shadows of the images which the fire throws on the wall of the den; to these they
give names, and if we add an echo which returns from the wall, the voices of the
passengers will seem to proceed from the shadows. Suppose now that you suddenly
turn them round and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at the real
images; will they believe them to be real? Will not their eyes be dazzled, and will they
not try to get away from the light to something which they are able to behold without
blinking? And suppose further, that they are dragged up a steep and rugged ascent into
the presence of the sun himself, will not their sight be darkened with the excess of light?
Some time will pass before they get the habit of perceiving at all; and at first they will be
able to perceive only shadows and reflections in the water; then they will recognize the
moon and the stars, and will at length behold the sun in his own proper place as he is.
Last of all they will conclude:—This is he who gives us the year and the seasons, and is
the author of all that we see. How will they rejoice in passing from darkness to light!
How worthless to them will seem the honours and glories of the den! But now imagine
further, that they descend into their old habitations;—in that underground dwelling they
will not see as well as their fellows, and will not be able to compete with them in the
measurement of the shadows on the wall; there will be many jokes about the man who
went on a visit to the sun and lost his eyes, and if they find anybody trying to set free
and enlighten one of their number, they will put him to death, if they can catch him.
Now the cave or den is the world of sight, the fire is the sun, the way upwards is the way
to knowledge, and in the world of knowledge the idea of good is last seen and with
difficulty, but when seen is inferred to be the author of good and right—parent of the
lord of light in this world, and of truth and understanding in the other. He who attains to
the beatific vision is always going upwards; he is unwilling to descend into political
assemblies and courts of law; for his eyes are apt to blink at the images or shadows of
images which they behold in them—he cannot enter into the ideas of those who have
never in their lives understood the relation of the shadow to the substance. But
blindness is of two kinds, and may be caused either by passing out of darkness into light
or out of light into darkness, and a man of sense will distinguish between them, and will
not laugh equally at both of them, but the blindness which arises from fulness of light
he will deem blessed, and pity the other; or if he laugh at the puzzled soul looking at the
sun, he will have more reason to laugh than the inhabitants of the den at those who
descend from above. There is a further lesson taught by this parable of ours. Some
persons fancy that instruction is like giving eyes to the blind, but we say that the faculty
of sight was always there, and that the soul only requires to be turned round towards
the light. And this is conversion; other virtues are almost like bodily habits, and may be
acquired in the same manner, but intelligence has a diviner life, and is indestructible,
turning either to good or evil according to the direction given. Did you never observe
how the mind of a clever rogue peers out of his eyes, and the more clearly he sees, the
more evil he does? Now if you take such an one, and cut away from him those leaden
weights of pleasure and desire which bind his soul to earth, his intelligence will be
turned round, and he will behold the truth as clearly as he now discerns his meaner
ends. And have we not decided that our rulers must neither be so uneducated as to
have no fixed rule of life, nor so over-educated as to be unwilling to leave their paradise
for the business of the world? We must choose out therefore the natures who are most
likely to ascend to the light and knowledge of the good; but we must not allow them to
remain in the region of light; they must be forced down again among the captives in the
den to partake of their labours and honours. ‘Will they not think this a hardship?’ You
should remember that our purpose in framing the State was not that our citizens should
do what they like, but that they should serve the State for the common good of all. May
we not fairly say to our philosopher,—Friend, we do you no wrong; for in other States
philosophy grows wild, and a wild plant owes nothing to the gardener, but you have
been trained by us to be the rulers and kings of our hive, and therefore we must insist
on your descending into the den. You must, each of you, take your turn, and become
able to use your eyes in the dark, and with a little practice you will see far better than
those who quarrel about the shadows, whose knowledge is a dream only, whilst yours is
a waking reality. It may be that the saint or philosopher who is best fitted, may also be
the least inclined to rule, but necessity is laid upon him, and he must no longer live in
the heaven of ideas. And this will be the salvation of the State. For those who rule must
not be those who are desirous to rule; and, if you can offer to our citizens a better life
than that of rulers generally is, there will be a chance that the rich, not only in this
world’s goods, but in virtue and wisdom, may bear rule. And the only life which is better
than the life of political ambition is that of philosophy, which is also the best preparation
for the government of a State.
Then now comes the question,—How shall we create our rulers; what way is there from
darkness to light? The change is effected by philosophy; it is not the turning over of an
oyster-shell, but the conversion of a soul from night to day, from becoming to being.
And what training will draw the soul upwards? Our former education had two branches,
gymnastic, which was occupied with the body, and music, the sister art, which infused a
natural harmony into mind and literature; but neither of these sciences gave any
promise of doing what we want. Nothing remains to us but that universal or primary
science of which all the arts and sciences are partakers, I mean number or calculation.
‘Very true.’ Including the art of war? ‘Yes, certainly.’ Then there is something ludicrous
about Palamedes in the tragedy, coming in and saying that he had invented number,
and had counted the ranks and set them in order. For if Agamemnon could not count
his feet (and without number how could he?) he must have been a pretty sort of general
indeed. No man should be a soldier who cannot count, and indeed he is hardly to be
called a man. But I am not speaking of these practical applications of arithmetic, for
number, in my view, is rather to be regarded as a conductor to thought and being. I will
explain what I mean by the last expression:—Things sensible are of two kinds; the one
class invite or stimulate the mind, while in the other the mind acquiesces. Now the
stimulating class are the things which suggest contrast and relation. For example,
suppose that I hold up to the eyes three fingers—a fore finger, a middle finger, a little
finger—the sight equally recognizes all three fingers, but without number cannot further
distinguish them. Or again, suppose two objects to be relatively great and small, these
ideas of greatness and smallness are supplied not by the sense, but by the mind. And
the perception of their contrast or relation quickens and sets in motion the mind, which
is puzzled by the confused intimations of sense, and has recourse to number in order to
find out whether the things indicated are one or more than one. Number replies that
they are two and not one, and are to be distinguished from one another. Again, the
sight beholds great and small, but only in a confused chaos, and not until they are
distinguished does the question arise of their respective natures; we are thus led on to
the distinction between the visible and intelligible. That was what I meant when I spoke
of stimulants to the intellect; I was thinking of the contradictions which arise in
perception. The idea of unity, for example, like that of a finger, does not arouse thought
unless involving some conception of plurality; but when the one is also the opposite of
one, the contradiction gives rise to reflection; an example of this is afforded by any
object of sight. All number has also an elevating effect; it raises the mind out of the
foam and flux of generation to the contemplation of being, having lesser military and
retail uses also. The retail use is not required by us; but as our guardian is to be a soldier
as well as a philosopher, the military one may be retained. And to our higher purpose no
science can be better adapted; but it must be pursued in the spirit of a philosopher, not
of a shopkeeper. It is concerned, not with visible objects, but with abstract truth; for
numbers are pure abstractions—the true arithmetician indignantly denies that his unit is
capable of division. When you divide, he insists that you are only multiplying; his ‘one’ is
not material or resolvable into fractions, but an unvarying and absolute equality; and
this proves the purely intellectual character of his study. Note also the great power
which arithmetic has of sharpening the wits; no other discipline is equally severe, or an
equal test of general ability, or equally improving to a stupid person.
Let our second branch of education be geometry. ‘I can easily see,’ replied Glaucon, ‘that
the skill of the general will be doubled by his knowledge of geometry.’ That is a small
matter; the use of geometry, to which I refer, is the assistance given by it in the
contemplation of the idea of good, and the compelling the mind to look at true being,
and not at generation only. Yet the present mode of pursuing these studies, as any one
who is the least of a mathematician is aware, is mean and ridiculous; they are made to
look downwards to the arts, and not upwards to eternal existence. The geometer is
always talking of squaring, subtending, apposing, as if he had in view action; whereas
knowledge is the real object of the study. It should elevate the soul, and create the mind
of philosophy; it should raise up what has fallen down, not to speak of lesser uses in war
and military tactics, and in the improvement of the faculties.
Shall we propose, as a third branch of our education, astronomy? ‘Very good,’ replied
Glaucon; ‘the knowledge of the heavens is necessary at once for husbandry, navigation,
military tactics.’ I like your way of giving useful reasons for everything in order to make
friends of the world. And there is a difficulty in proving to mankind that education is not
only useful information but a purification of the eye of the soul, which is better than the
bodily eye, for by this alone is truth seen. Now, will you appeal to mankind in general or
to the philosopher? or would you prefer to look to yourself only? ‘Every man is his own
best friend.’ Then take a step backward, for we are out of order, and insert the third
dimension which is of solids, after the second which is of planes, and then you may
proceed to solids in motion. But solid geometry is not popular and has not the
patronage of the State, nor is the use of it fully recognized; the difficulty is great, and
the votaries of the study are conceited and impatient. Still the charm of the pursuit wins
upon men, and, if government would lend a little assistance, there might be great
progress made. ‘Very true,’ replied Glaucon; ‘but do I understand you now to begin with
plane geometry, and to place next geometry of solids, and thirdly, astronomy, or the
motion of solids?’ Yes, I said; my hastiness has only hindered us.
‘Very good, and now let us proceed to astronomy, about which I am willing to speak in
your lofty strain. No one can fail to see that the contemplation of the heavens draws the
soul upwards.’ I am an exception, then; astronomy as studied at present appears to me
to draw the soul not upwards, but downwards. Star-gazing is just looking up at the
ceiling—no better; a man may lie on his back on land or on water—he may look up or
look down, but there is no science in that. The vision of knowledge of which I speak is
seen not with the eyes, but with the mind. All the magnificence of the heavens is but the
embroidery of a copy which falls far short of the divine Original, and teaches nothing
about the absolute harmonies or motions of things. Their beauty is like the beauty of
figures drawn by the hand of Daedalus or any other great artist, which may be used for
illustration, but no mathematician would seek to obtain from them true conceptions of
equality or numerical relations. How ridiculous then to look for these in the map of the
heavens, in which the imperfection of matter comes in everywhere as a disturbing
element, marring the symmetry of day and night, of months and years, of the sun and
stars in their courses. Only by problems can we place astronomy on a truly scientific
basis. Let the heavens alone, and exert the intellect.
Still, mathematics admit of other applications, as the Pythagoreans say, and we agree.
There is a sister science of harmonical motion, adapted to the ear as astronomy is to the
eye, and there may be other applications also. Let us inquire of the Pythagoreans about
them, not forgetting that we have an aim higher than theirs, which is the relation of
these sciences to the idea of good. The error which pervades astronomy also pervades
harmonics. The musicians put their ears in the place of their minds. ‘Yes,’ replied
Glaucon, ‘I like to see them laying their ears alongside of their neighbours’ faces—some
saying, “That’s a new note,” others declaring that the two notes are the same.’ Yes, I said;
but you mean the empirics who are always twisting and torturing the strings of the lyre,
and quarrelling about the tempers of the strings; I am referring rather to the
Pythagorean harmonists, who are almost equally in error. For they investigate only the
numbers of the consonances which are heard, and ascend no higher,—of the true
numerical harmony which is unheard, and is only to be found in problems, they have not
even a conception. ‘That last,’ he said, ‘must be a marvellous thing.’ A thing, I replied,
which is only useful if pursued with a view to the good.
All these sciences are the prelude of the strain, and are profitable if they are regarded in
their natural relations to one another. ‘I dare say, Socrates,’ said Glaucon; ‘but such a
study will be an endless business.’ What study do you mean—of the prelude, or what?
For all these things are only the prelude, and you surely do not suppose that a mere
mathematician is also a dialectician? ‘Certainly not. I have hardly ever known a
mathematician who could reason.’ And yet, Glaucon, is not true reasoning that hymn of
dialectic which is the music of the intellectual world, and which was by us compared to
the effort of sight, when from beholding the shadows on the wall we arrived at last at
the images which gave the shadows? Even so the dialectical faculty withdrawing from
sense arrives by the pure intellect at the contemplation of the idea of good, and never
rests but at the very end of the intellectual world. And the royal road out of the cave
into the light, and the blinking of the eyes at the sun and turning to contemplate the
shadows of reality, not the shadows of an image only—this progress and gradual
acquisition of a new faculty of sight by the help of the mathematical sciences, is the
elevation of the soul to the contemplation of the highest ideal of being.
‘So far, I agree with you. But now, leaving the prelude, let us proceed to the hymn. What,
then, is the nature of dialectic, and what are the paths which lead thither?’ Dear Glaucon,
you cannot follow me here. There can be no revelation of the absolute truth to one who
has not been disciplined in the previous sciences. But that there is a science of absolute
truth, which is attained in some way very different from those now practised, I am
confident. For all other arts or sciences are relative to human needs and opinions; and
the mathematical sciences are but a dream or hypothesis of true being, and never
analyse their own principles. Dialectic alone rises to the principle which is above
hypotheses, converting and gently leading the eye of the soul out of the barbarous
slough of ignorance into the light of the upper world, with the help of the sciences
which we have been describing—sciences, as they are often termed, although they
require some other name, implying greater clearness than opinion and less clearness
than science, and this in our previous sketch was understanding. And so we get four
names—two for intellect, and two for opinion,—reason or mind, understanding, faith,
perception of shadows—which make a proportion—
being:becoming::intellect:opinion—and science:belief::understanding: perception of
shadows. Dialectic may be further described as that science which defines and explains
the essence or being of each nature, which distinguishes and abstracts the good, and is
ready to do battle against all opponents in the cause of good. To him who is not a
dialectician life is but a sleepy dream; and many a man is in his grave before his is well
waked up. And would you have the future rulers of your ideal State intelligent beings, or
stupid as posts? ‘Certainly not the latter.’ Then you must train them in dialectic, which
will teach them to ask and answer questions, and is the coping-stone of the sciences.
I dare say that you have not forgotten how our rulers were chosen; and the process of
selection may be carried a step further:—As before, they must be constant and valiant,
good-looking, and of noble manners, but now they must also have natural ability which
education will improve; that is to say, they must be quick at learning, capable of mental
toil, retentive, solid, diligent natures, who combine intellectual with moral virtues; not
lame and one-sided, diligent in bodily exercise and indolent in mind, or conversely; not
a maimed soul, which hates falsehood and yet unintentionally is always wallowing in the
mire of ignorance; not a bastard or feeble person, but sound in wind and limb, and in
perfect condition for the great gymnastic trial of the mind. Justice herself can find no
fault with natures such as these; and they will be the saviours of our State; disciples of
another sort would only make philosophy more ridiculous than she is at present. Forgive
my enthusiasm; I am becoming excited; but when I see her trampled underfoot, I am
angry at the authors of her disgrace. ‘I did not notice that you were more excited than
you ought to have been.’ But I felt that I was. Now do not let us forget another point in
the selection of our disciples—that they must be young and not old. For Solon is
mistaken in saying that an old man can be always learning; youth is the time of study,
and here we must remember that the mind is free and dainty, and, unlike the body,
must not be made to work against the grain. Learning should be at first a sort of play, in
which the natural bent is detected. As in training them for war, the young dogs should
at first only taste blood; but when the necessary gymnastics are over which during two
or three years divide life between sleep and bodily exercise, then the education of the
soul will become a more serious matter. At twenty years of age, a selection must be
made of the more promising disciples, with whom a new epoch of education will begin.
The sciences which they have hitherto learned in fragments will now be brought into
relation with each other and with true being; for the power of combining them is the
test of speculative and dialectical ability. And afterwards at thirty a further selection shall
be made of those who are able to withdraw from the world of sense into the abstraction
of ideas. But at this point, judging from present experience, there is a danger that
dialectic may be the source of many evils. The danger may be illustrated by a parallel
case:—Imagine a person who has been brought up in wealth and luxury amid a crowd
of flatterers, and who is suddenly informed that he is a supposititious son. He has
hitherto honoured his reputed parents and disregarded the flatterers, and now he does
the reverse. This is just what happens with a man’s principles. There are certain doctrines
which he learnt at home and which exercised a parental authority over him. Presently he
finds that imputations are cast upon them; a troublesome querist comes and asks, ‘What
is the just and good?’ or proves that virtue is vice and vice virtue, and his mind becomes
unsettled, and he ceases to love, honour, and obey them as he has hitherto done. He is
seduced into the life of pleasure, and becomes a lawless person and a rogue. The case
of such speculators is very pitiable, and, in order that our thirty years’ old pupils may not
require this pity, let us take every possible care that young persons do not study
philosophy too early. For a young man is a sort of puppy who only plays with an
argument; and is reasoned into and out of his opinions every day; he soon begins to
believe nothing, and brings himself and philosophy into discredit. A man of thirty does
not run on in this way; he will argue and not merely contradict, and adds new honour to
philosophy by the sobriety of his conduct. What time shall we allow for this second
gymnastic training of the soul?—say, twice the time required for the gymnastics of the
body; six, or perhaps five years, to commence at thirty, and then for fifteen years let the
student go down into the den, and command armies, and gain experience of life. At fifty
let him return to the end of all things, and have his eyes uplifted to the idea of good,
and order his life after that pattern; if necessary, taking his turn at the helm of State, and
training up others to be his successors. When his time comes he shall depart in peace to
the islands of the blest. He shall be honoured with sacrifices, and receive such worship
as the Pythian oracle approves.
‘You are a statuary, Socrates, and have made a perfect image of our governors.’ Yes, and
of our governesses, for the women will share in all things with the men. And you will
admit that our State is not a mere aspiration, but may really come into being when there
shall arise philosopher-kings, one or more, who will despise earthly vanities, and will be
the servants of justice only. ‘And how will they begin their work?’ Their first act will be to
send away into the country all those who are more than ten years of age, and to
proceed with those who are left...
At the commencement of the sixth book, Plato anticipated his explanation of the
relation of the philosopher to the world in an allegory, in this, as in other passages,
following the order which he prescribes in education, and proceeding from the concrete
to the abstract. At the commencement of Book VII, under the figure of a cave having an
opening towards a fire and a way upwards to the true light, he returns to view the
divisions of knowledge, exhibiting familiarly, as in a picture, the result which had been
hardly won by a great effort of thought in the previous discussion; at the same time
casting a glance onward at the dialectical process, which is represented by the way
leading from darkness to light. The shadows, the images, the reflection of the sun and
stars in the water, the stars and sun themselves, severally correspond,—the first, to the
realm of fancy and poetry,—the second, to the world of sense,—the third, to the
abstractions or universals of sense, of which the mathematical sciences furnish the
type,—the fourth and last to the same abstractions, when seen in the unity of the idea,
from which they derive a new meaning and power. The true dialectical process begins
with the contemplation of the real stars, and not mere reflections of them, and ends
with the recognition of the sun, or idea of good, as the parent not only of light but of
warmth and growth. To the divisions of knowledge the stages of education partly
answer:—first, there is the early education of childhood and youth in the fancies of the
poets, and in the laws and customs of the State;—then there is the training of the body
to be a warrior athlete, and a good servant of the mind;—and thirdly, after an interval
follows the education of later life, which begins with mathematics and proceeds to
philosophy in general.
There seem to be two great aims in the philosophy of Plato,—first, to realize
abstractions; secondly, to connect them. According to him, the true education is that
which draws men from becoming to being, and to a comprehensive survey of all being.
He desires to develop in the human mind the faculty of seeing the universal in all things;
until at last the particulars of sense drop away and the universal alone remains. He then
seeks to combine the universals which he has disengaged from sense, not perceiving
that the correlation of them has no other basis but the common use of language. He
never understands that abstractions, as Hegel says, are ‘mere abstractions’—of use when
employed in the arrangement of facts, but adding nothing to the sum of knowledge
when pursued apart from them, or with reference to an imaginary idea of good. Still the
exercise of the faculty of abstraction apart from facts has enlarged the mind, and played
a great part in the education of the human race. Plato appreciated the value of this
faculty, and saw that it might be quickened by the study of number and relation. All
things in which there is opposition or proportion are suggestive of reflection. The mere
impression of sense evokes no power of thought or of mind, but when sensible objects
ask to be compared and distinguished, then philosophy begins. The science of
arithmetic first suggests such distinctions. The follow in order the other sciences of plain
and solid geometry, and of solids in motion, one branch of which is astronomy or the
harmony of the spheres,—to this is appended the sister science of the harmony of
sounds. Plato seems also to hint at the possibility of other applications of arithmetical or
mathematical proportions, such as we employ in chemistry and natural philosophy, such
as the Pythagoreans and even Aristotle make use of in Ethics and Politics, e.g. his
distinction between arithmetical and geometrical proportion in the Ethics (Book V), or
between numerical and proportional equality in the Politics.
The modern mathematician will readily sympathise with Plato’s delight in the properties
of pure mathematics. He will not be disinclined to say with him:—Let alone the heavens,
and study the beauties of number and figure in themselves. He too will be apt to
depreciate their application to the arts. He will observe that Plato has a conception of
geometry, in which figures are to be dispensed with; thus in a distant and shadowy way
seeming to anticipate the possibility of working geometrical problems by a more
general mode of analysis. He will remark with interest on the backward state of solid
geometry, which, alas! was not encouraged by the aid of the State in the age of Plato;
and he will recognize the grasp of Plato’s mind in his ability to conceive of one science
of solids in motion including the earth as well as the heavens,—not forgetting to notice
the intimation to which allusion has been already made, that besides astronomy and
harmonics the science of solids in motion may have other applications. Still more will he
be struck with the comprehensiveness of view which led Plato, at a time when these
sciences hardly existed, to say that they must be studied in relation to one another, and
to the idea of good, or common principle of truth and being. But he will also see (and
perhaps without surprise) that in that stage of physical and mathematical knowledge,
Plato has fallen into the error of supposing that he can construct the heavens a priori by
mathematical problems, and determine the principles of harmony irrespective of the
adaptation of sounds to the human ear. The illusion was a natural one in that age and
country. The simplicity and certainty of astronomy and harmonics seemed to contrast
with the variation and complexity of the world of sense; hence the circumstance that
there was some elementary basis of fact, some measurement of distance or time or
vibrations on which they must ultimately rest, was overlooked by him. The modern
predecessors of Newton fell into errors equally great; and Plato can hardly be said to
have been very far wrong, or may even claim a sort of prophetic insight into the subject,
when we consider that the greater part of astronomy at the present day consists of
abstract dynamics, by the help of which most astronomical discoveries have been made.
The metaphysical philosopher from his point of view recognizes mathematics as an
instrument of education,—which strengthens the power of attention, developes the
sense of order and the faculty of construction, and enables the mind to grasp under
simple formulae the quantitative differences of physical phenomena. But while
acknowledging their value in education, he sees also that they have no connexion with
our higher moral and intellectual ideas. In the attempt which Plato makes to connect
them, we easily trace the influences of ancient Pythagorean notions. There is no reason
to suppose that he is speaking of the ideal numbers; but he is describing numbers which
are pure abstractions, to which he assigns a real and separate existence, which, as ‘the
teachers of the art’ (meaning probably the Pythagoreans) would have affirmed, repel all
attempts at subdivision, and in which unity and every other number are conceived of as
absolute. The truth and certainty of numbers, when thus disengaged from phenomena,
gave them a kind of sacredness in the eyes of an ancient philosopher. Nor is it easy to
say how far ideas of order and fixedness may have had a moral and elevating influence
on the minds of men, ‘who,’ in the words of the Timaeus, ‘might learn to regulate their
erring lives according to them.’ It is worthy of remark that the old Pythagorean ethical
symbols still exist as figures of speech among ourselves. And those who in modern
times see the world pervaded by universal law, may also see an anticipation of this last
word of modern philosophy in the Platonic idea of good, which is the source and
measure of all things, and yet only an abstraction (Philebus).
Two passages seem to require more particular explanations. First, that which relates to
the analysis of vision. The difficulty in this passage may be explained, like many others,
from differences in the modes of conception prevailing among ancient and modern
thinkers. To us, the perceptions of sense are inseparable from the act of the mind which
accompanies them. The consciousness of form, colour, distance, is indistinguishable
from the simple sensation, which is the medium of them. Whereas to Plato sense is the
Heraclitean flux of sense, not the vision of objects in the order in which they actually
present themselves to the experienced sight, but as they may be imagined to appear
confused and blurred to the half-awakened eye of the infant. The first action of the mind
is aroused by the attempt to set in order this chaos, and the reason is required to frame
distinct conceptions under which the confused impressions of sense may be arranged.
Hence arises the question, ‘What is great, what is small?’ and thus begins the distinction
of the visible and the intelligible.
The second difficulty relates to Plato’s conception of harmonics. Three classes of
harmonists are distinguished by him:—first, the Pythagoreans, whom he proposes to
consult as in the previous discussion on music he was to consult Damon—they are
acknowledged to be masters in the art, but are altogether deficient in the knowledge of
its higher import and relation to the good; secondly, the mere empirics, whom Glaucon
appears to confuse with them, and whom both he and Socrates ludicrously describe as
experimenting by mere auscultation on the intervals of sounds. Both of these fall short
in different degrees of the Platonic idea of harmony, which must be studied in a purely
abstract way, first by the method of problems, and secondly as a part of universal
knowledge in relation to the idea of good.
The allegory has a political as well as a philosophical meaning. The den or cave
represents the narrow sphere of politics or law (compare the description of the
philosopher and lawyer in the Theaetetus), and the light of the eternal ideas is supposed
to exercise a disturbing influence on the minds of those who return to this lower world.
In other words, their principles are too wide for practical application; they are looking far
away into the past and future, when their business is with the present. The ideal is not
easily reduced to the conditions of actual life, and may often be at variance with them.
And at first, those who return are unable to compete with the inhabitants of the den in
the measurement of the shadows, and are derided and persecuted by them; but after a
while they see the things below in far truer proportions than those who have never
ascended into the upper world. The difference between the politician turned into a
philosopher and the philosopher turned into a politician, is symbolized by the two kinds
of disordered eyesight, the one which is experienced by the captive who is transferred
from darkness to day, the other, of the heavenly messenger who voluntarily for the
good of his fellow-men descends into the den. In what way the brighter light is to dawn
on the inhabitants of the lower world, or how the idea of good is to become the guiding
principle of politics, is left unexplained by Plato. Like the nature and divisions of
dialectic, of which Glaucon impatiently demands to be informed, perhaps he would have
said that the explanation could not be given except to a disciple of the previous
sciences. (Symposium.)
Many illustrations of this part of the Republic may be found in modern Politics and in
daily life. For among ourselves, too, there have been two sorts of Politicians or
Statesmen, whose eyesight has become disordered in two different ways. First, there
have been great men who, in the language of Burke, ‘have been too much given to
general maxims,’ who, like J.S. Mill or Burke himself, have been theorists or philosophers
before they were politicians, or who, having been students of history, have allowed
some great historical parallel, such as the English Revolution of 1688, or possibly
Athenian democracy or Roman Imperialism, to be the medium through which they
viewed contemporary events. Or perhaps the long projecting shadow of some existing
institution may have darkened their vision. The Church of the future, the Commonwealth
of the future, the Society of the future, have so absorbed their minds, that they are
unable to see in their true proportions the Politics of today. They have been intoxicated
with great ideas, such as liberty, or equality, or the greatest happiness of the greatest
number, or the brotherhood of humanity, and they no longer care to consider how
these ideas must be limited in practice or harmonized with the conditions of human life.
They are full of light, but the light to them has become only a sort of luminous mist or
blindness. Almost every one has known some enthusiastic half-educated person, who
sees everything at false distances, and in erroneous proportions.
With this disorder of eyesight may be contrasted another—of those who see not far into
the distance, but what is near only; who have been engaged all their lives in a trade or a
profession; who are limited to a set or sect of their own. Men of this kind have no
universal except their own interests or the interests of their class, no principle but the
opinion of persons like themselves, no knowledge of affairs beyond what they pick up in
the streets or at their club. Suppose them to be sent into a larger world, to undertake
some higher calling, from being tradesmen to turn generals or politicians, from being
schoolmasters to become philosophers:—or imagine them on a sudden to receive an
inward light which reveals to them for the first time in their lives a higher idea of God
and the existence of a spiritual world, by this sudden conversion or change is not their
daily life likely to be upset; and on the other hand will not many of their old prejudices
and narrownesses still adhere to them long after they have begun to take a more
comprehensive view of human things? From familiar examples like these we may learn
what Plato meant by the eyesight which is liable to two kinds of disorders.
Nor have we any difficulty in drawing a parallel between the young Athenian in the fifth
century before Christ who became unsettled by new ideas, and the student of a modern
University who has been the subject of a similar ‘aufklarung.’ We too observe that when
young men begin to criticise customary beliefs, or to analyse the constitution of human
nature, they are apt to lose hold of solid principle (Greek). They are like trees which have
been frequently transplanted. The earth about them is loose, and they have no roots
reaching far into the soil. They ‘light upon every flower,’ following their own wayward
wills, or because the wind blows them. They catch opinions, as diseases are caught—
when they are in the air. Borne hither and thither, ‘they speedily fall into beliefs’ the
opposite of those in which they were brought up. They hardly retain the distinction of
right and wrong; they seem to think one thing as good as another. They suppose
themselves to be searching after truth when they are playing the game of ‘follow my
leader.’ They fall in love ‘at first sight’ with paradoxes respecting morality, some fancy
about art, some novelty or eccentricity in religion, and like lovers they are so absorbed
for a time in their new notion that they can think of nothing else. The resolution of some
philosophical or theological question seems to them more interesting and important
than any substantial knowledge of literature or science or even than a good life. Like the
youth in the Philebus, they are ready to discourse to any one about a new philosophy.
They are generally the disciples of some eminent professor or sophist, whom they rather
imitate than understand. They may be counted happy if in later years they retain some
of the simple truths which they acquired in early education, and which they may,
perhaps, find to be worth all the rest. Such is the picture which Plato draws and which
we only reproduce, partly in his own words, of the dangers which beset youth in times
of transition, when old opinions are fading away and the new are not yet firmly
established. Their condition is ingeniously compared by him to that of a supposititious
son, who has made the discovery that his reputed parents are not his real ones, and, in
consequence, they have lost their authority over him.
The distinction between the mathematician and the dialectician is also noticeable. Plato
is very well aware that the faculty of the mathematician is quite distinct from the higher
philosophical sense which recognizes and combines first principles. The contempt which
he expresses for distinctions of words, the danger of involuntary falsehood, the apology
which Socrates makes for his earnestness of speech, are highly characteristic of the
Platonic style and mode of thought. The quaint notion that if Palamedes was the
inventor of number Agamemnon could not have counted his feet; the art by which we
are made to believe that this State of ours is not a dream only; the gravity with which
the first step is taken in the actual creation of the State, namely, the sending out of the
city all who had arrived at ten years of age, in order to expedite the business of
education by a generation, are also truly Platonic. (For the last, compare the passage at
the end of the third book, in which he expects the lie about the earthborn men to be
believed in the second generation.)
BOOK VIII.
And so we have arrived at the conclusion, that in the perfect State wives and children
are to be in common; and the education and pursuits of men and women, both in war
and peace, are to be common, and kings are to be philosophers and warriors, and the
soldiers of the State are to live together, having all things in common; and they are to
be warrior athletes, receiving no pay but only their food, from the other citizens. Now let
us return to the point at which we digressed. ‘That is easily done,’ he replied: ‘You were
speaking of the State which you had constructed, and of the individual who answered to
this, both of whom you affirmed to be good; and you said that of inferior States there
were four forms and four individuals corresponding to them, which although deficient in
various degrees, were all of them worth inspecting with a view to determining the
relative happiness or misery of the best or worst man. Then Polemarchus and
Adeimantus interrupted you, and this led to another argument,—and so here we are.’
Suppose that we put ourselves again in the same position, and do you repeat your
question. ‘I should like to know of what constitutions you were speaking?’ Besides the
perfect State there are only four of any note in Hellas:—first, the famous Lacedaemonian
or Cretan commonwealth; secondly, oligarchy, a State full of evils; thirdly, democracy,
which follows next in order; fourthly, tyranny, which is the disease or death of all
government. Now, States are not made of ‘oak and rock,’ but of flesh and blood; and
therefore as there are five States there must be five human natures in individuals, which
correspond to them. And first, there is the ambitious nature, which answers to the
Lacedaemonian State; secondly, the oligarchical nature; thirdly, the democratical; and
fourthly, the tyrannical. This last will have to be compared with the perfectly just, which
is the fifth, that we may know which is the happier, and then we shall be able to
determine whether the argument of Thrasymachus or our own is the more convincing.
And as before we began with the State and went on to the individual, so now, beginning
with timocracy, let us go on to the timocratical man, and then proceed to the other
forms of government, and the individuals who answer to them.
But how did timocracy arise out of the perfect State? Plainly, like all changes of
government, from division in the rulers. But whence came division? ‘Sing, heavenly
Muses,’ as Homer says;—let them condescend to answer us, as if we were children, to
whom they put on a solemn face in jest. ‘And what will they say?’ They will say that
human things are fated to decay, and even the perfect State will not escape from this
law of destiny, when ‘the wheel comes full circle’ in a period short or long. Plants or
animals have times of fertility and sterility, which the intelligence of rulers because
alloyed by sense will not enable them to ascertain, and children will be born out of
season. For whereas divine creations are in a perfect cycle or number, the human
creation is in a number which declines from perfection, and has four terms and three
intervals of numbers, increasing, waning, assimilating, dissimilating, and yet perfectly
commensurate with each other. The base of the number with a fourth added (or which is
3:4), multiplied by five and cubed, gives two harmonies:—the first a square number,
which is a hundred times the base (or a hundred times a hundred); the second, an
oblong, being a hundred squares of the rational diameter of a figure the side of which is
five, subtracting one from each square or two perfect squares from all, and adding a
hundred cubes of three. This entire number is geometrical and contains the rule or law
of generation. When this law is neglected marriages will be unpropitious; the inferior
offspring who are then born will in time become the rulers; the State will decline, and
education fall into decay; gymnastic will be preferred to music, and the gold and silver
and brass and iron will form a chaotic mass—thus division will arise. Such is the Muses’
answer to our question. ‘And a true answer, of course: —but what more have they to
say?’ They say that the two races, the iron and brass, and the silver and gold, will draw
the State different ways;— the one will take to trade and moneymaking, and the others,
having the true riches and not caring for money, will resist them: the contest will end in
a compromise; they will agree to have private property, and will enslave their fellowcitizens
who were once their friends and nurturers. But they will retain their warlike
character, and will be chiefly occupied in fighting and exercising rule. Thus arises
timocracy, which is intermediate between aristocracy and oligarchy.
The new form of government resembles the ideal in obedience to rulers and contempt
for trade, and having common meals, and in devotion to warlike and gymnastic
exercises. But corruption has crept into philosophy, and simplicity of character, which
was once her note, is now looked for only in the military class. Arts of war begin to
prevail over arts of peace; the ruler is no longer a philosopher; as in oligarchies, there
springs up among them an extravagant love of gain—get another man’s and save your
own, is their principle; and they have dark places in which they hoard their gold and
silver, for the use of their women and others; they take their pleasures by stealth, like
boys who are running away from their father—the law; and their education is not
inspired by the Muse, but imposed by the strong arm of power. The leading
characteristic of this State is party spirit and ambition.
And what manner of man answers to such a State? ‘In love of contention,’ replied
Adeimantus, ‘he will be like our friend Glaucon.’ In that respect, perhaps, but not in
others. He is self-asserting and ill-educated, yet fond of literature, although not himself
a speaker,—fierce with slaves, but obedient to rulers, a lover of power and honour,
which he hopes to gain by deeds of arms,—fond, too, of gymnastics and of hunting. As
he advances in years he grows avaricious, for he has lost philosophy, which is the only
saviour and guardian of men. His origin is as follows:—His father is a good man dwelling
in an ill-ordered State, who has retired from politics in order that he may lead a quiet
life. His mother is angry at her loss of precedence among other women; she is disgusted
at her husband’s selfishness, and she expatiates to her son on the unmanliness and
indolence of his father. The old family servant takes up the tale, and says to the youth:—
‘When you grow up you must be more of a man than your father.’ All the world are
agreed that he who minds his own business is an idiot, while a busybody is highly
honoured and esteemed. The young man compares this spirit with his father’s words
and ways, and as he is naturally well disposed, although he has suffered from evil
influences, he rests at a middle point and becomes ambitious and a lover of honour.
And now let us set another city over against another man. The next form of government
is oligarchy, in which the rule is of the rich only; nor is it difficult to see how such a State
arises. The decline begins with the possession of gold and silver; illegal modes of
expenditure are invented; one draws another on, and the multitude are infected; riches
outweigh virtue; lovers of money take the place of lovers of honour; misers of
politicians; and, in time, political privileges are confined by law to the rich, who do not
shrink from violence in order to effect their purposes.
Thus much of the origin,—let us next consider the evils of oligarchy. Would a man who
wanted to be safe on a voyage take a bad pilot because he was rich, or refuse a good
one because he was poor? And does not the analogy apply still more to the State? And
there are yet greater evils: two nations are struggling together in one—the rich and the
poor; and the rich dare not put arms into the hands of the poor, and are unwilling to
pay for defenders out of their own money. And have we not already condemned that
State in which the same persons are warriors as well as shopkeepers? The greatest evil
of all is that a man may sell his property and have no place in the State; while there is
one class which has enormous wealth, the other is entirely destitute. But observe that
these destitutes had not really any more of the governing nature in them when they
were rich than now that they are poor; they were miserable spendthrifts always. They are
the drones of the hive; only whereas the actual drone is unprovided by nature with a
sting, the two-legged things whom we call drones are some of them without stings and
some of them have dreadful stings; in other words, there are paupers and there are
rogues. These are never far apart; and in oligarchical cities, where nearly everybody is a
pauper who is not a ruler, you will find abundance of both. And this evil state of society
originates in bad education and bad government.
Like State, like man,—the change in the latter begins with the representative of
timocracy; he walks at first in the ways of his father, who may have been a statesman, or
general, perhaps; and presently he sees him ‘fallen from his high estate,’ the victim of
informers, dying in prison or exile, or by the hand of the executioner. The lesson which
he thus receives, makes him cautious; he leaves politics, represses his pride, and saves
pence. Avarice is enthroned as his bosom’s lord, and assumes the style of the Great
King; the rational and spirited elements sit humbly on the ground at either side, the one
immersed in calculation, the other absorbed in the admiration of wealth. The love of
honour turns to love of money; the conversion is instantaneous. The man is mean,
saving, toiling, the slave of one passion which is the master of the rest: Is he not the very
image of the State? He has had no education, or he would never have allowed the blind
god of riches to lead the dance within him. And being uneducated he will have many
slavish desires, some beggarly, some knavish, breeding in his soul. If he is the trustee of
an orphan, and has the power to defraud, he will soon prove that he is not without the
will, and that his passions are only restrained by fear and not by reason. Hence he leads
a divided existence; in which the better desires mostly prevail. But when he is
contending for prizes and other distinctions, he is afraid to incur a loss which is to be
repaid only by barren honour; in time of war he fights with a small part of his resources,
and usually keeps his money and loses the victory.
Next comes democracy and the democratic man, out of oligarchy and the oligarchical
man. Insatiable avarice is the ruling passion of an oligarchy; and they encourage
expensive habits in order that they may gain by the ruin of extravagant youth. Thus men
of family often lose their property or rights of citizenship; but they remain in the city, full
of hatred against the new owners of their estates and ripe for revolution. The usurer
with stooping walk pretends not to see them; he passes by, and leaves his sting—that is,
his money—in some other victim; and many a man has to pay the parent or principal
sum multiplied into a family of children, and is reduced into a state of dronage by him.
The only way of diminishing the evil is either to limit a man in his use of his property, or
to insist that he shall lend at his own risk. But the ruling class do not want remedies;
they care only for money, and are as careless of virtue as the poorest of the citizens.
Now there are occasions on which the governors and the governed meet together,—at
festivals, on a journey, voyaging or fighting. The sturdy pauper finds that in the hour of
danger he is not despised; he sees the rich man puffing and panting, and draws the
conclusion which he privately imparts to his companions,—‘that our people are not
good for much;’ and as a sickly frame is made ill by a mere touch from without, or
sometimes without external impulse is ready to fall to pieces of itself, so from the least
cause, or with none at all, the city falls ill and fights a battle for life or death. And
democracy comes into power when the poor are the victors, killing some and exiling
some, and giving equal shares in the government to all the rest.
The manner of life in such a State is that of democrats; there is freedom and plainness of
speech, and every man does what is right in his own eyes, and has his own way of life.
Hence arise the most various developments of character; the State is like a piece of
embroidery of which the colours and figures are the manners of men, and there are
many who, like women and children, prefer this variety to real beauty and excellence.
The State is not one but many, like a bazaar at which you can buy anything. The great
charm is, that you may do as you like; you may govern if you like, let it alone if you like;
go to war and make peace if you feel disposed, and all quite irrespective of anybody
else. When you condemn men to death they remain alive all the same; a gentleman is
desired to go into exile, and he stalks about the streets like a hero; and nobody sees him
or cares for him. Observe, too, how grandly Democracy sets her foot upon all our fine
theories of education,—how little she cares for the training of her statesmen! The only
qualification which she demands is the profession of patriotism. Such is democracy;—a
pleasing, lawless, various sort of government, distributing equality to equals and
unequals alike.
Let us now inspect the individual democrat; and first, as in the case of the State, we will
trace his antecedents. He is the son of a miserly oligarch, and has been taught by him to
restrain the love of unnecessary pleasures. Perhaps I ought to explain this latter term:—
Necessary pleasures are those which are good, and which we cannot do without;
unnecessary pleasures are those which do no good, and of which the desire might be
eradicated by early training. For example, the pleasures of eating and drinking are
necessary and healthy, up to a certain point; beyond that point they are alike hurtful to
body and mind, and the excess may be avoided. When in excess, they may be rightly
called expensive pleasures, in opposition to the useful ones. And the drone, as we called
him, is the slave of these unnecessary pleasures and desires, whereas the miserly
oligarch is subject only to the necessary.
The oligarch changes into the democrat in the following manner:—The youth who has
had a miserly bringing up, gets a taste of the drone’s honey; he meets with wild
companions, who introduce him to every new pleasure. As in the State, so in the
individual, there are allies on both sides, temptations from without and passions from
within; there is reason also and external influences of parents and friends in alliance with
the oligarchical principle; and the two factions are in violent conflict with one another.
Sometimes the party of order prevails, but then again new desires and new disorders
arise, and the whole mob of passions gets possession of the Acropolis, that is to say, the
soul, which they find void and unguarded by true words and works. Falsehoods and
illusions ascend to take their place; the prodigal goes back into the country of the
Lotophagi or drones, and openly dwells there. And if any offer of alliance or parley of
individual elders comes from home, the false spirits shut the gates of the castle and
permit no one to enter,—there is a battle, and they gain the victory; and straightway
making alliance with the desires, they banish modesty, which they call folly, and send
temperance over the border. When the house has been swept and garnished, they dress
up the exiled vices, and, crowning them with garlands, bring them back under new
names. Insolence they call good breeding, anarchy freedom, waste magnificence,
impudence courage. Such is the process by which the youth passes from the necessary
pleasures to the unnecessary. After a while he divides his time impartially between them;
and perhaps, when he gets older and the violence of passion has abated, he restores
some of the exiles and lives in a sort of equilibrium, indulging first one pleasure and
then another; and if reason comes and tells him that some pleasures are good and
honourable, and others bad and vile, he shakes his head and says that he can make no
distinction between them. Thus he lives in the fancy of the hour; sometimes he takes to
drink, and then he turns abstainer; he practises in the gymnasium or he does nothing at
all; then again he would be a philosopher or a politician; or again, he would be a warrior
or a man of business; he is
‘Every thing by starts and nothing long.’
There remains still the finest and fairest of all men and all States— tyranny and the
tyrant. Tyranny springs from democracy much as democracy springs from oligarchy.
Both arise from excess; the one from excess of wealth, the other from excess of freedom.
‘The great natural good of life,’ says the democrat, ‘is freedom.’ And this exclusive love
of freedom and regardlessness of everything else, is the cause of the change from
democracy to tyranny. The State demands the strong wine of freedom, and unless her
rulers give her a plentiful draught, punishes and insults them; equality and fraternity of
governors and governed is the approved principle. Anarchy is the law, not of the State
only, but of private houses, and extends even to the animals. Father and son, citizen and
foreigner, teacher and pupil, old and young, are all on a level; fathers and teachers fear
their sons and pupils, and the wisdom of the young man is a match for the elder, and
the old imitate the jaunty manners of the young because they are afraid of being
thought morose. Slaves are on a level with their masters and mistresses, and there is no
difference between men and women. Nay, the very animals in a democratic State have a
freedom which is unknown in other places. The she-dogs are as good as their shemistresses,
and horses and asses march along with dignity and run their noses against
anybody who comes in their way. ‘That has often been my experience.’ At last the
citizens become so sensitive that they cannot endure the yoke of laws, written or
unwritten; they would have no man call himself their master. Such is the glorious
beginning of things out of which tyranny springs. ‘Glorious, indeed; but what is to
follow?’ The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; for there is a law of contraries;
the excess of freedom passes into the excess of slavery, and the greater the freedom the
greater the slavery. You will remember that in the oligarchy were found two classes—
rogues and paupers, whom we compared to drones with and without stings. These two
classes are to the State what phlegm and bile are to the human body; and the Statephysician,
or legislator, must get rid of them, just as the bee-master keeps the drones
out of the hive. Now in a democracy, too, there are drones, but they are more numerous
and more dangerous than in the oligarchy; there they are inert and unpractised, here
they are full of life and animation; and the keener sort speak and act, while the others
buzz about the bema and prevent their opponents from being heard. And there is
another class in democratic States, of respectable, thriving individuals, who can be
squeezed when the drones have need of their possessions; there is moreover a third
class, who are the labourers and the artisans, and they make up the mass of the people.
When the people meet, they are omnipotent, but they cannot be brought together
unless they are attracted by a little honey; and the rich are made to supply the honey, of
which the demagogues keep the greater part themselves, giving a taste only to the
mob. Their victims attempt to resist; they are driven mad by the stings of the drones,
and so become downright oligarchs in self-defence. Then follow informations and
convictions for treason. The people have some protector whom they nurse into
greatness, and from this root the tree of tyranny springs. The nature of the change is
indicated in the old fable of the temple of Zeus Lycaeus, which tells how he who tastes
human flesh mixed up with the flesh of other victims will turn into a wolf. Even so the
protector, who tastes human blood, and slays some and exiles others with or without
law, who hints at abolition of debts and division of lands, must either perish or become
a wolf—that is, a tyrant. Perhaps he is driven out, but he soon comes back from exile;
and then if his enemies cannot get rid of him by lawful means, they plot his
assassination. Thereupon the friend of the people makes his well-known request to
them for a body-guard, which they readily grant, thinking only of his danger and not of
their own. Now let the rich man make to himself wings, for he will never run away again
if he does not do so then. And the Great Protector, having crushed all his rivals, stands
proudly erect in the chariot of State, a full-blown tyrant: Let us enquire into the nature of
his happiness.
In the early days of his tyranny he smiles and beams upon everybody; he is not a
‘dominus,’ no, not he: he has only come to put an end to debt and the monopoly of
land. Having got rid of foreign enemies, he makes himself necessary to the State by
always going to war. He is thus enabled to depress the poor by heavy taxes, and so keep
them at work; and he can get rid of bolder spirits by handing them over to the enemy.
Then comes unpopularity; some of his old associates have the courage to oppose him.
The consequence is, that he has to make a purgation of the State; but, unlike the
physician who purges away the bad, he must get rid of the high-spirited, the wise and
the wealthy; for he has no choice between death and a life of shame and dishonour. And
the more hated he is, the more he will require trusty guards; but how will he obtain
them? ‘They will come flocking like birds—for pay.’ Will he not rather obtain them on
the spot? He will take the slaves from their owners and make them his body-guard;
these are his trusted friends, who admire and look up to him. Are not the tragic poets
wise who magnify and exalt the tyrant, and say that he is wise by association with the
wise? And are not their praises of tyranny alone a sufficient reason why we should
exclude them from our State? They may go to other cities, and gather the mob about
them with fine words, and change commonwealths into tyrannies and democracies,
receiving honours and rewards for their services; but the higher they and their friends
ascend constitution hill, the more their honour will fail and become ‘too asthmatic to
mount.’ To return to the tyrant—How will he support that rare army of his? First, by
robbing the temples of their treasures, which will enable him to lighten the taxes; then
he will take all his father’s property, and spend it on his companions, male or female.
Now his father is the demus, and if the demus gets angry, and says that a great hulking
son ought not to be a burden on his parents, and bids him and his riotous crew begone,
then will the parent know what a monster he has been nurturing, and that the son
whom he would fain expel is too strong for him. ‘You do not mean to say that he will
beat his father?’ Yes, he will, after having taken away his arms. ‘Then he is a parricide
and a cruel, unnatural son.’ And the people have jumped from the fear of slavery into
slavery, out of the smoke into the fire. Thus liberty, when out of all order and reason,
passes into the worst form of servitude...
In the previous books Plato has described the ideal State; now he returns to the
perverted or declining forms, on which he had lightly touched at the end of Book IV.
These he describes in a succession of parallels between the individuals and the States,
tracing the origin of either in the State or individual which has preceded them. He
begins by asking the point at which he digressed; and is thus led shortly to recapitulate
the substance of the three former books, which also contain a parallel of the
philosopher and the State.
Of the first decline he gives no intelligible account; he would not have liked to admit the
most probable causes of the fall of his ideal State, which to us would appear to be the
impracticability of communism or the natural antagonism of the ruling and subject
classes. He throws a veil of mystery over the origin of the decline, which he attributes to
ignorance of the law of population. Of this law the famous geometrical figure or number
is the expression. Like the ancients in general, he had no idea of the gradual
perfectibility of man or of the education of the human race. His ideal was not to be
attained in the course of ages, but was to spring in full armour from the head of the
legislator. When good laws had been given, he thought only of the manner in which
they were likely to be corrupted, or of how they might be filled up in detail or restored
in accordance with their original spirit. He appears not to have reflected upon the full
meaning of his own words, ‘In the brief space of human life, nothing great can be
accomplished’; or again, as he afterwards says in the Laws, ‘Infinite time is the maker of
cities.’ The order of constitutions which is adopted by him represents an order of
thought rather than a succession of time, and may be considered as the first attempt to
frame a philosophy of history.
The first of these declining States is timocracy, or the government of soldiers and lovers
of honour, which answers to the Spartan State; this is a government of force, in which
education is not inspired by the Muses, but imposed by the law, and in which all the
finer elements of organization have disappeared. The philosopher himself has lost the
love of truth, and the soldier, who is of a simpler and honester nature, rules in his stead.
The individual who answers to timocracy has some noticeable qualities. He is described
as ill educated, but, like the Spartan, a lover of literature; and although he is a harsh
master to his servants he has no natural superiority over them. His character is based
upon a reaction against the circumstances of his father, who in a troubled city has
retired from politics; and his mother, who is dissatisfied at her own position, is always
urging him towards the life of political ambition. Such a character may have had this
origin, and indeed Livy attributes the Licinian laws to a feminine jealousy of a similar
kind. But there is obviously no connection between the manner in which the timocratic
State springs out of the ideal, and the mere accident by which the timocratic man is the
son of a retired statesman.
The two next stages in the decline of constitutions have even less historical foundation.
For there is no trace in Greek history of a polity like the Spartan or Cretan passing into
an oligarchy of wealth, or of the oligarchy of wealth passing into a democracy. The order
of history appears to be different; first, in the Homeric times there is the royal or
patriarchal form of government, which a century or two later was succeeded by an
oligarchy of birth rather than of wealth, and in which wealth was only the accident of the
hereditary possession of land and power. Sometimes this oligarchical government gave
way to a government based upon a qualification of property, which, according to
Aristotle’s mode of using words, would have been called a timocracy; and this in some
cities, as at Athens, became the conducting medium to democracy. But such was not the
necessary order of succession in States; nor, indeed, can any order be discerned in the
endless fluctuation of Greek history (like the tides in the Euripus), except, perhaps, in the
almost uniform tendency from monarchy to aristocracy in the earliest times. At first sight
there appears to be a similar inversion in the last step of the Platonic succession; for
tyranny, instead of being the natural end of democracy, in early Greek history appears
rather as a stage leading to democracy; the reign of Peisistratus and his sons is an
episode which comes between the legislation of Solon and the constitution of
Cleisthenes; and some secret cause common to them all seems to have led the greater
part of Hellas at her first appearance in the dawn of history, e.g. Athens, Argos, Corinth,
Sicyon, and nearly every State with the exception of Sparta, through a similar stage of
tyranny which ended either in oligarchy or democracy. But then we must remember that
Plato is describing rather the contemporary governments of the Sicilian States, which
alternated between democracy and tyranny, than the ancient history of Athens or
Corinth.
The portrait of the tyrant himself is just such as the later Greek delighted to draw of
Phalaris and Dionysius, in which, as in the lives of mediaeval saints or mythic heroes, the
conduct and actions of one were attributed to another in order to fill up the outline.
There was no enormity which the Greek was not today to believe of them; the tyrant was
the negation of government and law; his assassination was glorious; there was no crime,
however unnatural, which might not with probability be attributed to him. In this, Plato
was only following the common thought of his countrymen, which he embellished and
exaggerated with all the power of his genius. There is no need to suppose that he drew
from life; or that his knowledge of tyrants is derived from a personal acquaintance with
Dionysius. The manner in which he speaks of them would rather tend to render doubtful
his ever having ‘consorted’ with them, or entertained the schemes, which are attributed
to him in the Epistles, of regenerating Sicily by their help.
Plato in a hyperbolical and serio-comic vein exaggerates the follies of democracy which
he also sees reflected in social life. To him democracy is a state of individualism or
dissolution; in which every one is doing what is right in his own eyes. Of a people
animated by a common spirit of liberty, rising as one man to repel the Persian host,
which is the leading idea of democracy in Herodotus and Thucydides, he never seems to
think. But if he is not a believer in liberty, still less is he a lover of tyranny. His deeper
and more serious condemnation is reserved for the tyrant, who is the ideal of
wickedness and also of weakness, and who in his utter helplessness and suspiciousness
is leading an almost impossible existence, without that remnant of good which, in
Plato’s opinion, was required to give power to evil (Book I). This ideal of wickedness
living in helpless misery, is the reverse of that other portrait of perfect injustice ruling in
happiness and splendour, which first of all Thrasymachus, and afterwards the sons of
Ariston had drawn, and is also the reverse of the king whose rule of life is the good of
his subjects.
Each of these governments and individuals has a corresponding ethical gradation: the
ideal State is under the rule of reason, not extinguishing but harmonizing the passions,
and training them in virtue; in the timocracy and the timocratic man the constitution,
whether of the State or of the individual, is based, first, upon courage, and secondly,
upon the love of honour; this latter virtue, which is hardly to be esteemed a virtue, has
superseded all the rest. In the second stage of decline the virtues have altogether
disappeared, and the love of gain has succeeded to them; in the third stage, or
democracy, the various passions are allowed to have free play, and the virtues and vices
are impartially cultivated. But this freedom, which leads to many curious extravagances
of character, is in reality only a state of weakness and dissipation. At last, one monster
passion takes possession of the whole nature of man—this is tyranny. In all of them
excess—the excess first of wealth and then of freedom, is the element of decay.
The eighth book of the Republic abounds in pictures of life and fanciful allusions; the
use of metaphorical language is carried to a greater extent than anywhere else in Plato.
We may remark,
(1), the description of the two nations in one, which become more and more divided in
the Greek Republics, as in feudal times, and perhaps also in our own;
(2), the notion of democracy expressed in a sort of Pythagorean formula as equality
among unequals;
(3), the free and easy ways of men and animals, which are characteristic of liberty, as
foreign mercenaries and universal mistrust are of the tyrant;
(4), the proposal that mere debts should not be recoverable by law is a speculation
which has often been entertained by reformers of the law in modern times, and is in
harmony with the tendencies of modern legislation. Debt and land were the two great
difficulties of the ancient lawgiver: in modern times we may be said to have almost, if
not quite, solved the first of these difficulties, but hardly the second.
Still more remarkable are the corresponding portraits of individuals: there is the family
picture of the father and mother and the old servant of the timocratical man, and the
outward respectability and inherent meanness of the oligarchical; the uncontrolled
licence and freedom of the democrat, in which the young Alcibiades seems to be
depicted, doing right or wrong as he pleases, and who at last, like the prodigal, goes
into a far country (note here the play of language by which the democratic man is
himself represented under the image of a State having a citadel and receiving
embassies); and there is the wild-beast nature, which breaks loose in his successor. The
hit about the tyrant being a parricide; the representation of the tyrant’s life as an
obscene dream; the rhetorical surprise of a more miserable than the most miserable of
men in Book IX; the hint to the poets that if they are the friends of tyrants there is no
place for them in a constitutional State, and that they are too clever not to see the
propriety of their own expulsion; the continuous image of the drones who are of two
kinds, swelling at last into the monster drone having wings (Book IX),—are among
Plato’s happiest touches.
There remains to be considered the great difficulty of this book of the Republic, the socalled
number of the State. This is a puzzle almost as great as the Number of the Beast
in the Book of Revelation, and though apparently known to Aristotle, is referred to by
Cicero as a proverb of obscurity (Ep. ad Att.). And some have imagined that there is no
answer to the puzzle, and that Plato has been practising upon his readers. But such a
deception as this is inconsistent with the manner in which Aristotle speaks of the
number (Pol.), and would have been ridiculous to any reader of the Republic who was
acquainted with Greek mathematics. As little reason is there for supposing that Plato
intentionally used obscure expressions; the obscurity arises from our want of familiarity
with the subject. On the other hand, Plato himself indicates that he is not altogether
serious, and in describing his number as a solemn jest of the Muses, he appears to imply
some degree of satire on the symbolical use of number. (Compare Cratylus; Protag.)
Our hope of understanding the passage depends principally on an accurate study of the
words themselves; on which a faint light is thrown by the parallel passage in the ninth
book. Another help is the allusion in Aristotle, who makes the important remark that the
latter part of the passage (Greek) describes a solid figure. (Pol.—‘He only says that
nothing is abiding, but that all things change in a certain cycle; and that the origin of the
change is a base of numbers which are in the ratio of 4:3; and this when combined with
a figure of five gives two harmonies; he means when the number of this figure becomes
solid.’) Some further clue may be gathered from the appearance of the Pythagorean
triangle, which is denoted by the numbers 3, 4, 5, and in which, as in every right-angled
triangle, the squares of the two lesser sides equal the square of the hypotenuse (9 + 16
= 25).
Plato begins by speaking of a perfect or cyclical number (Tim.), i.e. a number in which
the sum of the divisors equals the whole; this is the divine or perfect number in which all
lesser cycles or revolutions are complete. He also speaks of a human or imperfect
number, having four terms and three intervals of numbers which are related to one
another in certain proportions; these he converts into figures, and finds in them when
they have been raised to the third power certain elements of number, which give two
‘harmonies,’ the one square, the other oblong; but he does not say that the square
number answers to the divine, or the oblong number to the human cycle; nor is any
intimation given that the first or divine number represents the period of the world, the
second the period of the state, or of the human race as Zeller supposes; nor is the divine
number afterwards mentioned (Arist.). The second is the number of generations or
births, and presides over them in the same mysterious manner in which the stars preside
over them, or in which, according to the Pythagoreans, opportunity, justice, marriage,
are represented by some number or figure. This is probably the number 216.
The explanation given in the text supposes the two harmonies to make up the number
8000. This explanation derives a certain plausibility from the circumstance that 8000 is
the ancient number of the Spartan citizens (Herod.), and would be what Plato might
have called ‘a number which nearly concerns the population of a city’; the mysterious
disappearance of the Spartan population may possibly have suggested to him the first
cause of his decline of States. The lesser or square ‘harmony,’ of 400, might be a symbol
of the guardians,—the larger or oblong ‘harmony,’ of the people, and the numbers 3, 4,
5 might refer respectively to the three orders in the State or parts of the soul, the four
virtues, the five forms of government. The harmony of the musical scale, which is
elsewhere used as a symbol of the harmony of the state, is also indicated. For the
numbers 3, 4, 5, which represent the sides of the Pythagorean triangle, also denote the
intervals of the scale.
The terms used in the statement of the problem may be explained as follows. A perfect
number (Greek), as already stated, is one which is equal to the sum of its divisors. Thus
6, which is the first perfect or cyclical number, = 1 + 2 + 3. The words (Greek), ‘terms’ or
‘notes,’ and (Greek), ‘intervals,’ are applicable to music as well as to number and figure.
(Greek) is the ‘base’ on which the whole calculation depends, or the ‘lowest term’ from
which it can be worked out. The words (Greek) have been variously translated—‘squared
and cubed’ (Donaldson), ‘equalling and equalled in power’ (Weber), ‘by involution and
evolution,’ i.e. by raising the power and extracting the root (as in the translation).
Numbers are called ‘like and unlike’ (Greek) when the factors or the sides of the planes
and cubes which they represent are or are not in the same ratio: e.g. 8 and 27 = 2 cubed
and 3 cubed; and conversely. ‘Waxing’ (Greek) numbers, called also ‘increasing’ (Greek),
are those which are exceeded by the sum of their divisors: e.g. 12 and 18 are less than
16 and 21. ‘Waning’ (Greek) numbers, called also ‘decreasing’ (Greek) are those which
succeed the sum of their divisors: e.g. 8 and 27 exceed 7 and 13. The words translated
‘commensurable and agreeable to one another’ (Greek) seem to be different ways of
describing the same relation, with more or less precision. They are equivalent to
‘expressible in terms having the same relation to one another,’ like the series 8, 12, 18,
27, each of which numbers is in the relation of (1 and 1/2) to the preceding. The ‘base,’
or ‘fundamental number, which has 1/3 added to it’ (1 and 1/3) = 4/3 or a musical
fourth. (Greek) is a ‘proportion’ of numbers as of musical notes, applied either to the
parts or factors of a single number or to the relation of one number to another. The first
harmony is a ‘square’ number (Greek); the second harmony is an ‘oblong’ number
(Greek), i.e. a number representing a figure of which the opposite sides only are equal.
(Greek) = ‘numbers squared from’ or ‘upon diameters’; (Greek) = ‘rational,’ i.e. omitting
fractions, (Greek), ‘irrational,’ i.e. including fractions; e.g. 49 is a square of the rational
diameter of a figure the side of which = 5: 50, of an irrational diameter of the same. For
several of the explanations here given and for a good deal besides I am indebted to an
excellent article on the Platonic Number by Dr. Donaldson (Proc. of the Philol. Society).
The conclusions which he draws from these data are summed up by him as follows.
Having assumed that the number of the perfect or divine cycle is the number of the
world, and the number of the imperfect cycle the number of the state, he proceeds: ‘The
period of the world is defined by the perfect number 6, that of the state by the cube of
that number or 216, which is the product of the last pair of terms in the Platonic
Tetractys (a series of seven terms, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27); and if we take this as the basis of
our computation, we shall have two cube numbers (Greek), viz. 8 and 27; and the mean
proportionals between these, viz. 12 and 18, will furnish three intervals and four terms,
and these terms and intervals stand related to one another in the sesqui-altera ratio, i.e.
each term is to the preceding as 3/2. Now if we remember that the number 216 = 8 x 27
= 3 cubed + 4 cubed + 5 cubed, and 3 squared + 4 squared = 5 squared, we must
admit that this number implies the numbers 3, 4, 5, to which musicians attach so much
importance. And if we combine the ratio 4/3 with the number 5, or multiply the ratios of
the sides by the hypotenuse, we shall by first squaring and then cubing obtain two
expressions, which denote the ratio of the two last pairs of terms in the Platonic
Tetractys, the former multiplied by the square, the latter by the cube of the number 10,
the sum of the first four digits which constitute the Platonic Tetractys.’ The two (Greek)
he elsewhere explains as follows: ‘The first (Greek) is (Greek), in other words (4/3 x 5) all
squared = 100 x 2 squared over 3 squared. The second (Greek), a cube of the same root,
is described as 100 multiplied (alpha) by the rational diameter of 5 diminished by unity,
i.e., as shown above, 48: (beta) by two incommensurable diameters, i.e. the two first
irrationals, or 2 and 3: and (gamma) by the cube of 3, or 27. Thus we have (48 + 5 + 27)
100 = 1000 x 2 cubed. This second harmony is to be the cube of the number of which
the former harmony is the square, and therefore must be divided by the cube of 3. In
other words, the whole expression will be: (1), for the first harmony, 400/9: (2), for the
second harmony, 8000/27.’
The reasons which have inclined me to agree with Dr. Donaldson and also with
Schleiermacher in supposing that 216 is the Platonic number of births are: (1) that it
coincides with the description of the number given in the first part of the passage
(Greek...): (2) that the number 216 with its permutations would have been familiar to a
Greek mathematician, though unfamiliar to us: (3) that 216 is the cube of 6, and also the
sum of 3 cubed, 4 cubed, 5 cubed, the numbers 3, 4, 5 representing the Pythagorean
triangle, of which the sides when squared equal the square of the hypotenuse (9 + 16 =
25): (4) that it is also the period of the Pythagorean Metempsychosis: (5) the three
ultimate terms or bases (3, 4, 5) of which 216 is composed answer to the third, fourth,
fifth in the musical scale: (6) that the number 216 is the product of the cubes of 2 and 3,
which are the two last terms in the Platonic Tetractys: (7) that the Pythagorean triangle is
said by Plutarch (de Is. et Osir.), Proclus (super prima Eucl.), and Quintilian (de Musica) to
be contained in this passage, so that the tradition of the school seems to point in the
same direction: (8) that the Pythagorean triangle is called also the figure of marriage
(Greek).
But though agreeing with Dr. Donaldson thus far, I see no reason for supposing, as he
does, that the first or perfect number is the world, the human or imperfect number the
state; nor has he given any proof that the second harmony is a cube. Nor do I think that
(Greek) can mean ‘two incommensurables,’ which he arbitrarily assumes to be 2 and 3,
but rather, as the preceding clause implies, (Greek), i.e. two square numbers based upon
irrational diameters of a figure the side of which is 5 = 50 x 2.
The greatest objection to the translation is the sense given to the words (Greek), ‘a base
of three with a third added to it, multiplied by 5.’ In this somewhat forced manner Plato
introduces once more the numbers of the Pythagorean triangle. But the coincidences in
the numbers which follow are in favour of the explanation. The first harmony of 400, as
has been already remarked, probably represents the rulers; the second and oblong
harmony of 7600, the people.
And here we take leave of the difficulty. The discovery of the riddle would be useless,
and would throw no light on ancient mathematics. The point of interest is that Plato
should have used such a symbol, and that so much of the Pythagorean spirit should
have prevailed in him. His general meaning is that divine creation is perfect, and is
represented or presided over by a perfect or cyclical number; human generation is
imperfect, and represented or presided over by an imperfect number or series of
numbers. The number 5040, which is the number of the citizens in the Laws, is expressly
based by him on utilitarian grounds, namely, the convenience of the number for
division; it is also made up of the first seven digits multiplied by one another. The
contrast of the perfect and imperfect number may have been easily suggested by the
corrections of the cycle, which were made first by Meton and secondly by Callippus; (the
latter is said to have been a pupil of Plato). Of the degree of importance or of exactness
to be attributed to the problem, the number of the tyrant in Book IX (729 = 365 x 2),
and the slight correction of the error in the number 5040/12 (Laws), may furnish a
criterion. There is nothing surprising in the circumstance that those who were seeking
for order in nature and had found order in number, should have imagined one to give
law to the other. Plato believes in a power of number far beyond what he could see
realized in the world around him, and he knows the great influence which ‘the little
matter of 1, 2, 3’ exercises upon education. He may even be thought to have a prophetic
anticipation of the discoveries of Quetelet and others, that numbers depend upon
numbers; e.g.—in population, the numbers of births and the respective numbers of
children born of either sex, on the respective ages of parents, i.e. on other numbers.
BOOK IX.
Last of all comes the tyrannical man, about whom we have to enquire, Whence is he,
and how does he live—in happiness or in misery? There is, however, a previous question
of the nature and number of the appetites, which I should like to consider first. Some of
them are unlawful, and yet admit of being chastened and weakened in various degrees
by the power of reason and law. ‘What appetites do you mean?’ I mean those which are
awake when the reasoning powers are asleep, which get up and walk about naked
without any self-respect or shame; and there is no conceivable folly or crime, however
cruel or unnatural, of which, in imagination, they may not be guilty. ‘True,’ he said; ‘very
true.’ But when a man’s pulse beats temperately; and he has supped on a feast of reason
and come to a knowledge of himself before going to rest, and has satisfied his desires
just enough to prevent their perturbing his reason, which remains clear and luminous,
and when he is free from quarrel and heat,—the visions which he has on his bed are
least irregular and abnormal. Even in good men there is such an irregular wild-beast
nature, which peers out in sleep.
To return:—You remember what was said of the democrat; that he was the son of a
miserly father, who encouraged the saving desires and repressed the ornamental and
expensive ones; presently the youth got into fine company, and began to entertain a
dislike to his father’s narrow ways; and being a better man than the corrupters of his
youth, he came to a mean, and led a life, not of lawless or slavish passion, but of regular
and successive indulgence. Now imagine that the youth has become a father, and has a
son who is exposed to the same temptations, and has companions who lead him into
every sort of iniquity, and parents and friends who try to keep him right. The counsellors
of evil find that their only chance of retaining him is to implant in his soul a monster
drone, or love; while other desires buzz around him and mystify him with sweet sounds
and scents, this monster love takes possession of him, and puts an end to every true or
modest thought or wish. Love, like drunkenness and madness, is a tyranny; and the
tyrannical man, whether made by nature or habit, is just a drinking, lusting, furious sort
of animal.
And how does such an one live? ‘Nay, that you must tell me.’ Well then, I fancy that he
will live amid revelries and harlotries, and love will be the lord and master of the house.
Many desires require much money, and so he spends all that he has and borrows more;
and when he has nothing the young ravens are still in the nest in which they were
hatched, crying for food. Love urges them on; and they must be gratified by force or
fraud, or if not, they become painful and troublesome; and as the new pleasures
succeed the old ones, so will the son take possession of the goods of his parents; if they
show signs of refusing, he will defraud and deceive them; and if they openly resist, what
then? ‘I can only say, that I should not much like to be in their place.’ But, O heavens,
Adeimantus, to think that for some new-fangled and unnecessary love he will give up
his old father and mother, best and dearest of friends, or enslave them to the fancies of
the hour! Truly a tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and mother! When there is no
more to be got out of them, he turns burglar or pickpocket, or robs a temple. Love
overmasters the thoughts of his youth, and he becomes in sober reality the monster that
he was sometimes in sleep. He waxes strong in all violence and lawlessness; and is ready
for any deed of daring that will supply the wants of his rabble-rout. In a well-ordered
State there are only a few such, and these in time of war go out and become the
mercenaries of a tyrant. But in time of peace they stay at home and do mischief; they are
the thieves, footpads, cut-purses, man-stealers of the community; or if they are able to
speak, they turn false-witnesses and informers. ‘No small catalogue of crimes truly, even
if the perpetrators are few.’ Yes, I said; but small and great are relative terms, and no
crimes which are committed by them approach those of the tyrant, whom this class,
growing strong and numerous, create out of themselves. If the people yield, well and
good, but, if they resist, then, as before he beat his father and mother, so now he beats
his fatherland and motherland, and places his mercenaries over them. Such men in their
early days live with flatterers, and they themselves flatter others, in order to gain their
ends; but they soon discard their followers when they have no longer any need of them;
they are always either masters or servants,—the joys of friendship are unknown to them.
And they are utterly treacherous and unjust, if the nature of justice be at all understood
by us. They realize our dream; and he who is the most of a tyrant by nature, and leads
the life of a tyrant for the longest time, will be the worst of them, and being the worst of
them, will also be the most miserable.
Like man, like State,—the tyrannical man will answer to tyranny, which is the extreme
opposite of the royal State; for one is the best and the other the worst. But which is the
happier? Great and terrible as the tyrant may appear enthroned amid his satellites, let us
not be afraid to go in and ask; and the answer is, that the monarchical is the happiest,
and the tyrannical the most miserable of States. And may we not ask the same question
about the men themselves, requesting some one to look into them who is able to
penetrate the inner nature of man, and will not be panic-struck by the vain pomp of
tyranny? I will suppose that he is one who has lived with him, and has seen him in family
life, or perhaps in the hour of trouble and danger.
Assuming that we ourselves are the impartial judge for whom we seek, let us begin by
comparing the individual and State, and ask first of all, whether the State is likely to be
free or enslaved—Will there not be a little freedom and a great deal of slavery? And the
freedom is of the bad, and the slavery of the good; and this applies to the man as well
as to the State; for his soul is full of meanness and slavery, and the better part is
enslaved to the worse. He cannot do what he would, and his mind is full of confusion; he
is the very reverse of a freeman. The State will be poor and full of misery and sorrow;
and the man’s soul will also be poor and full of sorrows, and he will be the most
miserable of men. No, not the most miserable, for there is yet a more miserable. ‘Who is
that?’ The tyrannical man who has the misfortune also to become a public tyrant. ‘There
I suspect that you are right.’ Say rather, ‘I am sure;’ conjecture is out of place in an
enquiry of this nature. He is like a wealthy owner of slaves, only he has more of them
than any private individual. You will say, ‘The owners of slaves are not generally in any
fear of them.’ But why? Because the whole city is in a league which protects the
individual. Suppose however that one of these owners and his household is carried off
by a god into a wilderness, where there are no freemen to help him—will he not be in
an agony of terror?—will he not be compelled to flatter his slaves and to promise them
many things sore against his will? And suppose the same god who carried him off were
to surround him with neighbours who declare that no man ought to have slaves, and
that the owners of them should be punished with death. ‘Still worse and worse! He will
be in the midst of his enemies.’ And is not our tyrant such a captive soul, who is
tormented by a swarm of passions which he cannot indulge; living indoors always like a
woman, and jealous of those who can go out and see the world?
Having so many evils, will not the most miserable of men be still more miserable in a
public station? Master of others when he is not master of himself; like a sick man who is
compelled to be an athlete; the meanest of slaves and the most abject of flatterers;
wanting all things, and never able to satisfy his desires; always in fear and distraction,
like the State of which he is the representative. His jealous, hateful, faithless temper
grows worse with command; he is more and more faithless, envious, unrighteous,—the
most wretched of men, a misery to himself and to others. And so let us have a final trial
and proclamation; need we hire a herald, or shall I proclaim the result? ‘Made the
proclamation yourself.’ The son of Ariston (the best) is of opinion that the best and
justest of men is also the happiest, and that this is he who is the most royal master of
himself; and that the unjust man is he who is the greatest tyrant of himself and of his
State. And I add further—‘seen or unseen by gods or men.’
This is our first proof. The second is derived from the three kinds of pleasure, which
answer to the three elements of the soul—reason, passion, desire; under which last is
comprehended avarice as well as sensual appetite, while passion includes ambition,
party-feeling, love of reputation. Reason, again, is solely directed to the attainment of
truth, and careless of money and reputation. In accordance with the difference of men’s
natures, one of these three principles is in the ascendant, and they have their several
pleasures corresponding to them. Interrogate now the three natures, and each one will
be found praising his own pleasures and depreciating those of others. The moneymaker
will contrast the vanity of knowledge with the solid advantages of wealth. The
ambitious man will despise knowledge which brings no honour; whereas the
philosopher will regard only the fruition of truth, and will call other pleasures necessary
rather than good. Now, how shall we decide between them? Is there any better criterion
than experience and knowledge? And which of the three has the truest knowledge and
the widest experience? The experience of youth makes the philosopher acquainted with
the two kinds of desire, but the avaricious and the ambitious man never taste the
pleasures of truth and wisdom. Honour he has equally with them; they are ‘judged of
him,’ but he is ‘not judged of them,’ for they never attain to the knowledge of true
being. And his instrument is reason, whereas their standard is only wealth and honour;
and if by reason we are to judge, his good will be the truest. And so we arrive at the
result that the pleasure of the rational part of the soul, and a life passed in such pleasure
is the pleasantest. He who has a right to judge judges thus. Next comes the life of
ambition, and, in the third place, that of money-making.
Twice has the just man overthrown the unjust—once more, as in an Olympian contest,
first offering up a prayer to the saviour Zeus, let him try a fall. A wise man whispers to
me that the pleasures of the wise are true and pure; all others are a shadow only. Let us
examine this: Is not pleasure opposed to pain, and is there not a mean state which is
neither? When a man is sick, nothing is more pleasant to him than health. But this he
never found out while he was well. In pain he desires only to cease from pain; on the
other hand, when he is in an ecstasy of pleasure, rest is painful to him. Thus rest or
cessation is both pleasure and pain. But can that which is neither become both? Again,
pleasure and pain are motions, and the absence of them is rest; but if so, how can the
absence of either of them be the other? Thus we are led to infer that the contradiction is
an appearance only, and witchery of the senses. And these are not the only pleasures,
for there are others which have no preceding pains. Pure pleasure then is not the
absence of pain, nor pure pain the absence of pleasure; although most of the pleasures
which reach the mind through the body are reliefs of pain, and have not only their
reactions when they depart, but their anticipations before they come. They can be best
described in a simile. There is in nature an upper, lower, and middle region, and he who
passes from the lower to the middle imagines that he is going up and is already in the
upper world; and if he were taken back again would think, and truly think, that he was
descending. All this arises out of his ignorance of the true upper, middle, and lower
regions. And a like confusion happens with pleasure and pain, and with many other
things. The man who compares grey with black, calls grey white; and the man who
compares absence of pain with pain, calls the absence of pain pleasure. Again, hunger
and thirst are inanitions of the body, ignorance and folly of the soul; and food is the
satisfaction of the one, knowledge of the other. Now which is the purer satisfaction—
that of eating and drinking, or that of knowledge? Consider the matter thus: The
satisfaction of that which has more existence is truer than of that which has less. The
invariable and immortal has a more real existence than the variable and mortal, and has
a corresponding measure of knowledge and truth. The soul, again, has more existence
and truth and knowledge than the body, and is therefore more really satisfied and has a
more natural pleasure. Those who feast only on earthly food, are always going at
random up to the middle and down again; but they never pass into the true upper
world, or have a taste of true pleasure. They are like fatted beasts, full of gluttony and
sensuality, and ready to kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust; for they are
not filled with true being, and their vessel is leaky (Gorgias). Their pleasures are mere
shadows of pleasure, mixed with pain, coloured and intensified by contrast, and
therefore intensely desired; and men go fighting about them, as Stesichorus says that
the Greeks fought about the shadow of Helen at Troy, because they know not the truth.
The same may be said of the passionate element:—the desires of the ambitious soul, as
well as of the covetous, have an inferior satisfaction. Only when under the guidance of
reason do either of the other principles do their own business or attain the pleasure
which is natural to them. When not attaining, they compel the other parts of the soul to
pursue a shadow of pleasure which is not theirs. And the more distant they are from
philosophy and reason, the more distant they will be from law and order, and the more
illusive will be their pleasures. The desires of love and tyranny are the farthest from law,
and those of the king are nearest to it. There is one genuine pleasure, and two spurious
ones: the tyrant goes beyond even the latter; he has run away altogether from law and
reason. Nor can the measure of his inferiority be told, except in a figure. The tyrant is the
third removed from the oligarch, and has therefore, not a shadow of his pleasure, but
the shadow of a shadow only. The oligarch, again, is thrice removed from the king, and
thus we get the formula 3 x 3, which is the number of a surface, representing the
shadow which is the tyrant’s pleasure, and if you like to cube this ‘number of the beast,’
you will find that the measure of the difference amounts to 729; the king is 729 times
more happy than the tyrant. And this extraordinary number is NEARLY equal to the
number of days and nights in a year (365 x 2 = 730); and is therefore concerned with
human life. This is the interval between a good and bad man in happiness only: what
must be the difference between them in comeliness of life and virtue!
Perhaps you may remember some one saying at the beginning of our discussion that
the unjust man was profited if he had the reputation of justice. Now that we know the
nature of justice and injustice, let us make an image of the soul, which will personify his
words. First of all, fashion a multitudinous beast, having a ring of heads of all manner of
animals, tame and wild, and able to produce and change them at pleasure. Suppose
now another form of a lion, and another of a man; the second smaller than the first, the
third than the second; join them together and cover them with a human skin, in which
they are completely concealed. When this has been done, let us tell the supporter of
injustice that he is feeding up the beasts and starving the man. The maintainer of justice,
on the other hand, is trying to strengthen the man; he is nourishing the gentle principle
within him, and making an alliance with the lion heart, in order that he may be able to
keep down the many-headed hydra, and bring all into unity with each other and with
themselves. Thus in every point of view, whether in relation to pleasure, honour, or
advantage, the just man is right, and the unjust wrong.
But now, let us reason with the unjust, who is not intentionally in error. Is not the noble
that which subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the God in man; the ignoble, that
which subjects the man to the beast? And if so, who would receive gold on condition
that he was to degrade the noblest part of himself under the worst?—who would sell his
son or daughter into the hands of brutal and evil men, for any amount of money? And
will he sell his own fairer and diviner part without any compunction to the most godless
and foul? Would he not be worse than Eriphyle, who sold her husband’s life for a
necklace? And intemperance is the letting loose of the multiform monster, and pride
and sullenness are the growth and increase of the lion and serpent element, while luxury
and effeminacy are caused by a too great relaxation of spirit. Flattery and meanness
again arise when the spirited element is subjected to avarice, and the lion is habituated
to become a monkey. The real disgrace of handicraft arts is, that those who are engaged
in them have to flatter, instead of mastering their desires; therefore we say that they
should be placed under the control of the better principle in another because they have
none in themselves; not, as Thrasymachus imagined, to the injury of the subjects, but for
their good. And our intention in educating the young, is to give them self-control; the
law desires to nurse up in them a higher principle, and when they have acquired this,
they may go their ways.
‘What, then, shall a man profit, if he gain the whole world’ and become more and more
wicked? Or what shall he profit by escaping discovery, if the concealment of evil
prevents the cure? If he had been punished, the brute within him would have been
silenced, and the gentler element liberated; and he would have united temperance,
justice, and wisdom in his soul—a union better far than any combination of bodily gifts.
The man of understanding will honour knowledge above all; in the next place he will
keep under his body, not only for the sake of health and strength, but in order to attain
the most perfect harmony of body and soul. In the acquisition of riches, too, he will aim
at order and harmony; he will not desire to heap up wealth without measure, but he will
fear that the increase of wealth will disturb the constitution of his own soul. For the
same reason he will only accept such honours as will make him a better man; any others
he will decline. ‘In that case,’ said he, ‘he will never be a politician.’ Yes, but he will, in his
own city; though probably not in his native country, unless by some divine accident.
‘You mean that he will be a citizen of the ideal city, which has no place upon earth.’ But
in heaven, I replied, there is a pattern of such a city, and he who wishes may order his
life after that image. Whether such a state is or ever will be matters not; he will act
according to that pattern and no other...
The most noticeable points in the 9th Book of the Republic are:—(1) the account of
pleasure; (2) the number of the interval which divides the king from the tyrant; (3) the
pattern which is in heaven.
1. Plato’s account of pleasure is remarkable for moderation, and in this respect contrasts
with the later Platonists and the views which are attributed to them by Aristotle. He is
not, like the Cynics, opposed to all pleasure, but rather desires that the several parts of
the soul shall have their natural satisfaction; he even agrees with the Epicureans in
describing pleasure as something more than the absence of pain. This is proved by the
circumstance that there are pleasures which have no antecedent pains (as he also
remarks in the Philebus), such as the pleasures of smell, and also the pleasures of hope
and anticipation. In the previous book he had made the distinction between necessary
and unnecessary pleasure, which is repeated by Aristotle, and he now observes that
there are a further class of ‘wild beast’ pleasures, corresponding to Aristotle’s (Greek).
He dwells upon the relative and unreal character of sensual pleasures and the illusion
which arises out of the contrast of pleasure and pain, pointing out the superiority of the
pleasures of reason, which are at rest, over the fleeting pleasures of sense and emotion.
The pre-eminence of royal pleasure is shown by the fact that reason is able to form a
judgment of the lower pleasures, while the two lower parts of the soul are incapable of
judging the pleasures of reason. Thus, in his treatment of pleasure, as in many other
subjects, the philosophy of Plato is ‘sawn up into quantities’ by Aristotle; the analysis
which was originally made by him became in the next generation the foundation of
further technical distinctions. Both in Plato and Aristotle we note the illusion under
which the ancients fell of regarding the transience of pleasure as a proof of its unreality,
and of confounding the permanence of the intellectual pleasures with the
unchangeableness of the knowledge from which they are derived. Neither do we like to
admit that the pleasures of knowledge, though more elevating, are not more lasting
than other pleasures, and are almost equally dependent on the accidents of our bodily
state (Introduction to Philebus).
2. The number of the interval which separates the king from the tyrant, and royal from
tyrannical pleasures, is 729, the cube of 9. Which Plato characteristically designates as a
number concerned with human life, because NEARLY equivalent to the number of days
and nights in the year. He is desirous of proclaiming that the interval between them is
immeasurable, and invents a formula to give expression to his idea. Those who spoke of
justice as a cube, of virtue as an art of measuring (Prot.), saw no inappropriateness in
conceiving the soul under the figure of a line, or the pleasure of the tyrant as separated
from the pleasure of the king by the numerical interval of 729. And in modern times we
sometimes use metaphorically what Plato employed as a philosophical formula. ‘It is not
easy to estimate the loss of the tyrant, except perhaps in this way,’ says Plato. So we
might say, that although the life of a good man is not to be compared to that of a bad
man, yet you may measure the difference between them by valuing one minute of the
one at an hour of the other (‘One day in thy courts is better than a thousand’), or you
might say that ‘there is an infinite difference.’ But this is not so much as saying, in
homely phrase, ‘They are a thousand miles asunder.’ And accordingly Plato finds the
natural vehicle of his thoughts in a progression of numbers; this arithmetical formula he
draws out with the utmost seriousness, and both here and in the number of generation
seems to find an additional proof of the truth of his speculation in forming the number
into a geometrical figure; just as persons in our own day are apt to fancy that a
statement is verified when it has been only thrown into an abstract form. In speaking of
the number 729 as proper to human life, he probably intended to intimate that one year
of the tyrannical = 12 hours of the royal life.
The simple observation that the comparison of two similar solids is effected by the
comparison of the cubes of their sides, is the mathematical groundwork of this fanciful
expression. There is some difficulty in explaining the steps by which the number 729 is
obtained; the oligarch is removed in the third degree from the royal and aristocratical,
and the tyrant in the third degree from the oligarchical; but we have to arrange the
terms as the sides of a square and to count the oligarch twice over, thus reckoning them
not as = 5 but as = 9. The square of 9 is passed lightly over as only a step towards the
cube.
3. Towards the close of the Republic, Plato seems to be more and more convinced of the
ideal character of his own speculations. At the end of the 9th Book the pattern which is
in heaven takes the place of the city of philosophers on earth. The vision which has
received form and substance at his hands, is now discovered to be at a distance. And yet
this distant kingdom is also the rule of man’s life. (‘Say not lo! here, or lo! there, for the
kingdom of God is within you.’) Thus a note is struck which prepares for the revelation
of a future life in the following Book. But the future life is present still; the ideal of
politics is to be realized in the individual.
BOOK X.
Many things pleased me in the order of our State, but there was nothing which I liked
better than the regulation about poetry. The division of the soul throws a new light on
our exclusion of imitation. I do not mind telling you in confidence that all poetry is an
outrage on the understanding, unless the hearers have that balm of knowledge which
heals error. I have loved Homer ever since I was a boy, and even now he appears to me
to be the great master of tragic poetry. But much as I love the man, I love truth more,
and therefore I must speak out: and first of all, will you explain what is imitation, for
really I do not understand? ‘How likely then that I should understand!’ That might very
well be, for the duller often sees better than the keener eye. ‘True, but in your presence I
can hardly venture to say what I think.’ Then suppose that we begin in our old fashion,
with the doctrine of universals. Let us assume the existence of beds and tables. There is
one idea of a bed, or of a table, which the maker of each had in his mind when making
them; he did not make the ideas of beds and tables, but he made beds and tables
according to the ideas. And is there not a maker of the works of all workmen, who
makes not only vessels but plants and animals, himself, the earth and heaven, and things
in heaven and under the earth? He makes the Gods also. ‘He must be a wizard indeed!’
But do you not see that there is a sense in which you could do the same? You have only
to take a mirror, and catch the reflection of the sun, and the earth, or anything else—
there now you have made them. ‘Yes, but only in appearance.’ Exactly so; and the
painter is such a creator as you are with the mirror, and he is even more unreal than the
carpenter; although neither the carpenter nor any other artist can be supposed to make
the absolute bed. ‘Not if philosophers may be believed.’ Nor need we wonder that his
bed has but an imperfect relation to the truth. Reflect:—Here are three beds; one in
nature, which is made by God; another, which is made by the carpenter; and the third,
by the painter. God only made one, nor could he have made more than one; for if there
had been two, there would always have been a third—more absolute and abstract than
either, under which they would have been included. We may therefore conceive God to
be the natural maker of the bed, and in a lower sense the carpenter is also the maker;
but the painter is rather the imitator of what the other two make; he has to do with a
creation which is thrice removed from reality. And the tragic poet is an imitator, and, like
every other imitator, is thrice removed from the king and from the truth. The painter
imitates not the original bed, but the bed made by the carpenter. And this, without
being really different, appears to be different, and has many points of view, of which
only one is caught by the painter, who represents everything because he represents a
piece of everything, and that piece an image. And he can paint any other artist, although
he knows nothing of their arts; and this with sufficient skill to deceive children or simple
people. Suppose now that somebody came to us and told us, how he had met a man
who knew all that everybody knows, and better than anybody:—should we not infer him
to be a simpleton who, having no discernment of truth and falsehood, had met with a
wizard or enchanter, whom he fancied to be all-wise? And when we hear persons saying
that Homer and the tragedians know all the arts and all the virtues, must we not infer
that they are under a similar delusion? they do not see that the poets are imitators, and
that their creations are only imitations. ‘Very true.’ But if a person could create as well as
imitate, he would rather leave some permanent work and not an imitation only; he
would rather be the receiver than the giver of praise? ‘Yes, for then he would have more
honour and advantage.’
Let us now interrogate Homer and the poets. Friend Homer, say I to him, I am not going
to ask you about medicine, or any art to which your poems incidentally refer, but about
their main subjects—war, military tactics, politics. If you are only twice and not thrice
removed from the truth—not an imitator or an image-maker, please to inform us what
good you have ever done to mankind? Is there any city which professes to have received
laws from you, as Sicily and Italy have from Charondas, Sparta from Lycurgus, Athens
from Solon? Or was any war ever carried on by your counsels? or is any invention
attributed to you, as there is to Thales and Anacharsis? Or is there any Homeric way of
life, such as the Pythagorean was, in which you instructed men, and which is called after
you? ‘No, indeed; and Creophylus (Flesh-child) was even more unfortunate in his
breeding than he was in his name, if, as tradition says, Homer in his lifetime was allowed
by him and his other friends to starve.’ Yes, but could this ever have happened if Homer
had really been the educator of Hellas? Would he not have had many devoted
followers? If Protagoras and Prodicus can persuade their contemporaries that no one
can manage house or State without them, is it likely that Homer and Hesiod would have
been allowed to go about as beggars—I mean if they had really been able to do the
world any good?— would not men have compelled them to stay where they were, or
have followed them about in order to get education? But they did not; and therefore we
may infer that Homer and all the poets are only imitators, who do but imitate the
appearances of things. For as a painter by a knowledge of figure and colour can paint a
cobbler without any practice in cobbling, so the poet can delineate any art in the colours
of language, and give harmony and rhythm to the cobbler and also to the general; and
you know how mere narration, when deprived of the ornaments of metre, is like a face
which has lost the beauty of youth and never had any other. Once more, the imitator
has no knowledge of reality, but only of appearance. The painter paints, and the artificer
makes a bridle and reins, but neither understands the use of them—the knowledge of
this is confined to the horseman; and so of other things. Thus we have three arts: one of
use, another of invention, a third of imitation; and the user furnishes the rule to the two
others. The flute-player will know the good and bad flute, and the maker will put faith in
him; but the imitator will neither know nor have faith— neither science nor true opinion
can be ascribed to him. Imitation, then, is devoid of knowledge, being only a kind of
play or sport, and the tragic and epic poets are imitators in the highest degree.
And now let us enquire, what is the faculty in man which answers to imitation. Allow me
to explain my meaning: Objects are differently seen when in the water and when out of
the water, when near and when at a distance; and the painter or juggler makes use of
this variation to impose upon us. And the art of measuring and weighing and calculating
comes in to save our bewildered minds from the power of appearance; for, as we were
saying, two contrary opinions of the same about the same and at the same time, cannot
both of them be true. But which of them is true is determined by the art of calculation;
and this is allied to the better faculty in the soul, as the arts of imitation are to the
worse. And the same holds of the ear as well as of the eye, of poetry as well as painting.
The imitation is of actions voluntary or involuntary, in which there is an expectation of a
good or bad result, and present experience of pleasure and pain. But is a man in
harmony with himself when he is the subject of these conflicting influences? Is there not
rather a contradiction in him? Let me further ask, whether he is more likely to control
sorrow when he is alone or when he is in company. ‘In the latter case.’ Feeling would
lead him to indulge his sorrow, but reason and law control him and enjoin patience;
since he cannot know whether his affliction is good or evil, and no human thing is of any
great consequence, while sorrow is certainly a hindrance to good counsel. For when we
stumble, we should not, like children, make an uproar; we should take the measures
which reason prescribes, not raising a lament, but finding a cure. And the better part of
us is ready to follow reason, while the irrational principle is full of sorrow and distraction
at the recollection of our troubles. Unfortunately, however, this latter furnishes the chief
materials of the imitative arts. Whereas reason is ever in repose and cannot easily be
displayed, especially to a mixed multitude who have no experience of her. Thus the poet
is like the painter in two ways: first he paints an inferior degree of truth, and secondly,
he is concerned with an inferior part of the soul. He indulges the feelings, while he
enfeebles the reason; and we refuse to allow him to have authority over the mind of
man; for he has no measure of greater and less, and is a maker of images and very far
gone from truth.
But we have not yet mentioned the heaviest count in the indictment—the power which
poetry has of injuriously exciting the feelings. When we hear some passage in which a
hero laments his sufferings at tedious length, you know that we sympathize with him
and praise the poet; and yet in our own sorrows such an exhibition of feeling is
regarded as effeminate and unmanly (Ion). Now, ought a man to feel pleasure in seeing
another do what he hates and abominates in himself? Is he not giving way to a
sentiment which in his own case he would control?—he is off his guard because the
sorrow is another’s; and he thinks that he may indulge his feelings without disgrace, and
will be the gainer by the pleasure. But the inevitable consequence is that he who begins
by weeping at the sorrows of others, will end by weeping at his own. The same is true of
comedy,—you may often laugh at buffoonery which you would be ashamed to utter,
and the love of coarse merriment on the stage will at last turn you into a buffoon at
home. Poetry feeds and waters the passions and desires; she lets them rule instead of
ruling them. And therefore, when we hear the encomiasts of Homer affirming that he is
the educator of Hellas, and that all life should be regulated by his precepts, we may
allow the excellence of their intentions, and agree with them in thinking Homer a great
poet and tragedian. But we shall continue to prohibit all poetry which goes beyond
hymns to the Gods and praises of famous men. Not pleasure and pain, but law and
reason shall rule in our State.
These are our grounds for expelling poetry; but lest she should charge us with
discourtesy, let us also make an apology to her. We will remind her that there is an
ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, of which there are many traces in the
writings of the poets, such as the saying of ‘the she-dog, yelping at her mistress,’ and
‘the philosophers who are ready to circumvent Zeus,’ and ‘the philosophers who are
paupers.’ Nevertheless we bear her no ill-will, and will gladly allow her to return upon
condition that she makes a defence of herself in verse; and her supporters who are not
poets may speak in prose. We confess her charms; but if she cannot show that she is
useful as well as delightful, like rational lovers, we must renounce our love, though
endeared to us by early associations. Having come to years of discretion, we know that
poetry is not truth, and that a man should be careful how he introduces her to that state
or constitution which he himself is; for there is a mighty issue at stake—no less than the
good or evil of a human soul. And it is not worth while to forsake justice and virtue for
the attractions of poetry, any more than for the sake of honour or wealth. ‘I agree with
you.’
And yet the rewards of virtue are greater far than I have described. ‘And can we
conceive things greater still?’ Not, perhaps, in this brief span of life: but should an
immortal being care about anything short of eternity? ‘I do not understand what you
mean?’ Do you not know that the soul is immortal? ‘Surely you are not prepared to
prove that?’ Indeed I am. ‘Then let me hear this argument, of which you make so light.’
You would admit that everything has an element of good and of evil. In all things there
is an inherent corruption; and if this cannot destroy them, nothing else will. The soul too
has her own corrupting principles, which are injustice, intemperance, cowardice, and the
like. But none of these destroy the soul in the same sense that disease destroys the
body. The soul may be full of all iniquities, but is not, by reason of them, brought any
nearer to death. Nothing which was not destroyed from within ever perished by external
affection of evil. The body, which is one thing, cannot be destroyed by food, which is
another, unless the badness of the food is communicated to the body. Neither can the
soul, which is one thing, be corrupted by the body, which is another, unless she herself is
infected. And as no bodily evil can infect the soul, neither can any bodily evil, whether
disease or violence, or any other destroy the soul, unless it can be shown to render her
unholy and unjust. But no one will ever prove that the souls of men become more unjust
when they die. If a person has the audacity to say the contrary, the answer is—Then why
do criminals require the hand of the executioner, and not die of themselves? ‘Truly,’ he
said, ‘injustice would not be very terrible if it brought a cessation of evil; but I rather
believe that the injustice which murders others may tend to quicken and stimulate the
life of the unjust.’ You are quite right. If sin which is her own natural and inherent evil
cannot destroy the soul, hardly will anything else destroy her. But the soul which cannot
be destroyed either by internal or external evil must be immortal and everlasting. And if
this be true, souls will always exist in the same number. They cannot diminish, because
they cannot be destroyed; nor yet increase, for the increase of the immortal must come
from something mortal, and so all would end in immortality. Neither is the soul variable
and diverse; for that which is immortal must be of the fairest and simplest composition.
If we would conceive her truly, and so behold justice and injustice in their own nature,
she must be viewed by the light of reason pure as at birth, or as she is reflected in
philosophy when holding converse with the divine and immortal and eternal. In her
present condition we see her only like the sea-god Glaucus, bruised and maimed in the
sea which is the world, and covered with shells and stones which are incrusted upon her
from the entertainments of earth.
Thus far, as the argument required, we have said nothing of the rewards and honours
which the poets attribute to justice; we have contented ourselves with showing that
justice in herself is best for the soul in herself, even if a man should put on a Gyges’ ring
and have the helmet of Hades too. And now you shall repay me what you borrowed;
and I will enumerate the rewards of justice in life and after death. I granted, for the sake
of argument, as you will remember, that evil might perhaps escape the knowledge of
Gods and men, although this was really impossible. And since I have shown that justice
has reality, you must grant me also that she has the palm of appearance. In the first
place, the just man is known to the Gods, and he is therefore the friend of the Gods, and
he will receive at their hands every good, always excepting such evil as is the necessary
consequence of former sins. All things end in good to him, either in life or after death,
even what appears to be evil; for the Gods have a care of him who desires to be in their
likeness. And what shall we say of men? Is not honesty the best policy? The clever rogue
makes a great start at first, but breaks down before he reaches the goal, and slinks away
in dishonour; whereas the true runner perseveres to the end, and receives the prize. And
you must allow me to repeat all the blessings which you attributed to the fortunate
unjust—they bear rule in the city, they marry and give in marriage to whom they will;
and the evils which you attributed to the unfortunate just, do really fall in the end on the
unjust, although, as you implied, their sufferings are better veiled in silence.
But all the blessings of this present life are as nothing when compared with those which
await good men after death. ‘I should like to hear about them.’ Come, then, and I will tell
you the story of Er, the son of Armenius, a valiant man. He was supposed to have died in
battle, but ten days afterwards his body was found untouched by corruption and sent
home for burial. On the twelfth day he was placed on the funeral pyre and there he
came to life again, and told what he had seen in the world below. He said that his soul
went with a great company to a place, in which there were two chasms near together in
the earth beneath, and two corresponding chasms in the heaven above. And there were
judges sitting in the intermediate space, bidding the just ascend by the heavenly way on
the right hand, having the seal of their judgment set upon them before, while the unjust,
having the seal behind, were bidden to descend by the way on the left hand. Him they
told to look and listen, as he was to be their messenger to men from the world below.
And he beheld and saw the souls departing after judgment at either chasm; some who
came from earth, were worn and travel-stained; others, who came from heaven, were
clean and bright. They seemed glad to meet and rest awhile in the meadow; here they
discoursed with one another of what they had seen in the other world. Those who came
from earth wept at the remembrance of their sorrows, but the spirits from above spoke
of glorious sights and heavenly bliss. He said that for every evil deed they were
punished tenfold—now the journey was of a thousand years’ duration, because the life
of man was reckoned as a hundred years—and the rewards of virtue were in the same
proportion. He added something hardly worth repeating about infants dying almost as
soon as they were born. Of parricides and other murderers he had tortures still more
terrible to narrate. He was present when one of the spirits asked— Where is Ardiaeus
the Great? (This Ardiaeus was a cruel tyrant, who had murdered his father, and his elder
brother, a thousand years before.) Another spirit answered, ‘He comes not hither, and
will never come. And I myself,’ he added, ‘actually saw this terrible sight. At the entrance
of the chasm, as we were about to reascend, Ardiaeus appeared, and some other
sinners—most of whom had been tyrants, but not all—and just as they fancied that they
were returning to life, the chasm gave a roar, and then wild, fiery-looking men who
knew the meaning of the sound, seized him and several others, and bound them hand
and foot and threw them down, and dragged them along at the side of the road,
lacerating them and carding them like wool, and explaining to the passers-by, that they
were going to be cast into hell.’ The greatest terror of the pilgrims ascending was lest
they should hear the voice, and when there was silence one by one they passed up with
joy. To these sufferings there were corresponding delights.
On the eighth day the souls of the pilgrims resumed their journey, and in four days
came to a spot whence they looked down upon a line of light, in colour like a rainbow,
only brighter and clearer. One day more brought them to the place, and they saw that
this was the column of light which binds together the whole universe. The ends of the
column were fastened to heaven, and from them hung the distaff of Necessity, on which
all the heavenly bodies turned—the hook and spindle were of adamant, and the whorl
of a mixed substance. The whorl was in form like a number of boxes fitting into one
another with their edges turned upwards, making together a single whorl which was
pierced by the spindle. The outermost had the rim broadest, and the inner whorls were
smaller and smaller, and had their rims narrower. The largest (the fixed stars) was
spangled—the seventh (the sun) was brightest—the eighth (the moon) shone by the
light of the seventh—the second and fifth (Saturn and Mercury) were most like one
another and yellower than the eighth—the third (Jupiter) had the whitest light—the
fourth (Mars) was red—the sixth (Venus) was in whiteness second. The whole had one
motion, but while this was revolving in one direction the seven inner circles were
moving in the opposite, with various degrees of swiftness and slowness. The spindle
turned on the knees of Necessity, and a Siren stood hymning upon each circle, while
Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, the daughters of Necessity, sat on thrones at equal
intervals, singing of past, present, and future, responsive to the music of the Sirens;
Clotho from time to time guiding the outer circle with a touch of her right hand;
Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner circles; Lachesis in turn
putting forth her hand from time to time to guide both of them. On their arrival the
pilgrims went to Lachesis, and there was an interpreter who arranged them, and taking
from her knees lots, and samples of lives, got up into a pulpit and said: ‘Mortal souls,
hear the words of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. A new period of mortal life has
begun, and you may choose what divinity you please; the responsibility of choosing is
with you—God is blameless.’ After speaking thus, he cast the lots among them and each
one took up the lot which fell near him. He then placed on the ground before them the
samples of lives, many more than the souls present; and there were all sorts of lives, of
men and of animals. There were tyrannies ending in misery and exile, and lives of men
and women famous for their different qualities; and also mixed lives, made up of wealth
and poverty, sickness and health. Here, Glaucon, is the great risk of human life, and
therefore the whole of education should be directed to the acquisition of such a
knowledge as will teach a man to refuse the evil and choose the good. He should know
all the combinations which occur in life—of beauty with poverty or with wealth,— of
knowledge with external goods,—and at last choose with reference to the nature of the
soul, regarding that only as the better life which makes men better, and leaving the rest.
And a man must take with him an iron sense of truth and right into the world below,
that there too he may remain undazzled by wealth or the allurements of evil, and be
determined to avoid the extremes and choose the mean. For this, as the messenger
reported the interpreter to have said, is the true happiness of man; and any one, as he
proclaimed, may, if he choose with understanding, have a good lot, even though he
come last. ‘Let not the first be careless in his choice, nor the last despair.’ He spoke; and
when he had spoken, he who had drawn the first lot chose a tyranny: he did not see that
he was fated to devour his own children—and when he discovered his mistake, he wept
and beat his breast, blaming chance and the Gods and anybody rather than himself. He
was one of those who had come from heaven, and in his previous life had been a citizen
of a well-ordered State, but he had only habit and no philosophy. Like many another, he
made a bad choice, because he had no experience of life; whereas those who came from
earth and had seen trouble were not in such a hurry to choose. But if a man had
followed philosophy while upon earth, and had been moderately fortunate in his lot, he
might not only be happy here, but his pilgrimage both from and to this world would be
smooth and heavenly. Nothing was more curious than the spectacle of the choice, at
once sad and laughable and wonderful; most of the souls only seeking to avoid their
own condition in a previous life. He saw the soul of Orpheus changing into a swan
because he would not be born of a woman; there was Thamyras becoming a
nightingale; musical birds, like the swan, choosing to be men; the twentieth soul, which
was that of Ajax, preferring the life of a lion to that of a man, in remembrance of the
injustice which was done to him in the judgment of the arms; and Agamemnon, from a
like enmity to human nature, passing into an eagle. About the middle was the soul of
Atalanta choosing the honours of an athlete, and next to her Epeus taking the nature of
a workwoman; among the last was Thersites, who was changing himself into a monkey.
Thither, the last of all, came Odysseus, and sought the lot of a private man, which lay
neglected and despised, and when he found it he went away rejoicing, and said that if
he had been first instead of last, his choice would have been the same. Men, too, were
seen passing into animals, and wild and tame animals changing into one another.
When all the souls had chosen they went to Lachesis, who sent with each of them their
genius or attendant to fulfil their lot. He first of all brought them under the hand of
Clotho, and drew them within the revolution of the spindle impelled by her hand; from
her they were carried to Atropos, who made the threads irreversible; whence, without
turning round, they passed beneath the throne of Necessity; and when they had all
passed, they moved on in scorching heat to the plain of Forgetfulness and rested at
evening by the river Unmindful, whose water could not be retained in any vessel; of this
they had all to drink a certain quantity—some of them drank more than was required,
and he who drank forgot all things. Er himself was prevented from drinking. When they
had gone to rest, about the middle of the night there were thunderstorms and
earthquakes, and suddenly they were all driven divers ways, shooting like stars to their
birth. Concerning his return to the body, he only knew that awaking suddenly in the
morning he found himself lying on the pyre.
Thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved, and will be our salvation, if we believe that the
soul is immortal, and hold fast to the heavenly way of Justice and Knowledge. So shall
we pass undefiled over the river of Forgetfulness, and be dear to ourselves and to the
Gods, and have a crown of reward and happiness both in this world and also in the
millennial pilgrimage of the other.
The Tenth Book of the Republic of Plato falls into two divisions: first, resuming an old
thread which has been interrupted, Socrates assails the poets, who, now that the nature
of the soul has been analyzed, are seen to be very far gone from the truth; and secondly,
having shown the reality of the happiness of the just, he demands that appearance shall
be restored to him, and then proceeds to prove the immortality of the soul. The
argument, as in the Phaedo and Gorgias, is supplemented by the vision of a future life.
Why Plato, who was himself a poet, and whose dialogues are poems and dramas, should
have been hostile to the poets as a class, and especially to the dramatic poets; why he
should not have seen that truth may be embodied in verse as well as in prose, and that
there are some indefinable lights and shadows of human life which can only be
expressed in poetry—some elements of imagination which always entwine with reason;
why he should have supposed epic verse to be inseparably associated with the
impurities of the old Hellenic mythology; why he should try Homer and Hesiod by the
unfair and prosaic test of utility,—are questions which have always been debated
amongst students of Plato. Though unable to give a complete answer to them, we may
show—first, that his views arose naturally out of the circumstances of his age; and
secondly, we may elicit the truth as well as the error which is contained in them.
He is the enemy of the poets because poetry was declining in his own lifetime, and a
theatrocracy, as he says in the Laws, had taken the place of an intellectual aristocracy.
Euripides exhibited the last phase of the tragic drama, and in him Plato saw the friend
and apologist of tyrants, and the Sophist of tragedy. The old comedy was almost extinct;
the new had not yet arisen. Dramatic and lyric poetry, like every other branch of Greek
literature, was falling under the power of rhetoric. There was no ‘second or third’ to
Aeschylus and Sophocles in the generation which followed them. Aristophanes, in one
of his later comedies (Frogs), speaks of ‘thousands of tragedy-making prattlers,’ whose
attempts at poetry he compares to the chirping of swallows; ‘their garrulity went far
beyond Euripides,’—‘they appeared once upon the stage, and there was an end of
them.’ To a man of genius who had a real appreciation of the godlike Aeschylus and the
noble and gentle Sophocles, though disagreeing with some parts of their ‘theology’
(Rep.), these ‘minor poets’ must have been contemptible and intolerable. There is no
feeling stronger in the dialogues of Plato than a sense of the decline and decay both in
literature and in politics which marked his own age. Nor can he have been expected to
look with favour on the licence of Aristophanes, now at the end of his career, who had
begun by satirizing Socrates in the Clouds, and in a similar spirit forty years afterwards
had satirized the founders of ideal commonwealths in his Eccleziazusae, or Female
Parliament (Laws).
There were other reasons for the antagonism of Plato to poetry. The profession of an
actor was regarded by him as a degradation of human nature, for ‘one man in his life’
cannot ‘play many parts;’ the characters which the actor performs seem to destroy his
own character, and to leave nothing which can be truly called himself. Neither can any
man live his life and act it. The actor is the slave of his art, not the master of it. Taking
this view Plato is more decided in his expulsion of the dramatic than of the epic poets,
though he must have known that the Greek tragedians afforded noble lessons and
examples of virtue and patriotism, to which nothing in Homer can be compared. But
great dramatic or even great rhetorical power is hardly consistent with firmness or
strength of mind, and dramatic talent is often incidentally associated with a weak or
dissolute character.
In the Tenth Book Plato introduces a new series of objections. First, he says that the poet
or painter is an imitator, and in the third degree removed from the truth. His creations
are not tested by rule and measure; they are only appearances. In modern times we
should say that art is not merely imitation, but rather the expression of the ideal in
forms of sense. Even adopting the humble image of Plato, from which his argument
derives a colour, we should maintain that the artist may ennoble the bed which he
paints by the folds of the drapery, or by the feeling of home which he introduces; and
there have been modern painters who have imparted such an ideal interest to a
blacksmith’s or a carpenter’s shop. The eye or mind which feels as well as sees can give
dignity and pathos to a ruined mill, or a straw-built shed (Rembrandt), to the hull of a
vessel ‘going to its last home’ (Turner). Still more would this apply to the greatest works
of art, which seem to be the visible embodiment of the divine. Had Plato been asked
whether the Zeus or Athene of Pheidias was the imitation of an imitation only, would he
not have been compelled to admit that something more was to be found in them than
in the form of any mortal; and that the rule of proportion to which they conformed was
‘higher far than any geometry or arithmetic could express?’ (Statesman.)
Again, Plato objects to the imitative arts that they express the emotional rather than the
rational part of human nature. He does not admit Aristotle’s theory, that tragedy or
other serious imitations are a purgation of the passions by pity and fear; to him they
appear only to afford the opportunity of indulging them. Yet we must acknowledge that
we may sometimes cure disordered emotions by giving expression to them; and that
they often gain strength when pent up within our own breast. It is not every indulgence
of the feelings which is to be condemned. For there may be a gratification of the higher
as well as of the lower—thoughts which are too deep or too sad to be expressed by
ourselves, may find an utterance in the words of poets. Every one would acknowledge
that there have been times when they were consoled and elevated by beautiful music or
by the sublimity of architecture or by the peacefulness of nature. Plato has himself
admitted, in the earlier part of the Republic, that the arts might have the effect of
harmonizing as well as of enervating the mind; but in the Tenth Book he regards them
through a Stoic or Puritan medium. He asks only ‘What good have they done?’ and is
not satisfied with the reply, that ‘They have given innocent pleasure to mankind.’
He tells us that he rejoices in the banishment of the poets, since he has found by the
analysis of the soul that they are concerned with the inferior faculties. He means to say
that the higher faculties have to do with universals, the lower with particulars of sense.
The poets are on a level with their own age, but not on a level with Socrates and Plato;
and he was well aware that Homer and Hesiod could not be made a rule of life by any
process of legitimate interpretation; his ironical use of them is in fact a denial of their
authority; he saw, too, that the poets were not critics—as he says in the Apology, ‘Any
one was a better interpreter of their writings than they were themselves. He himself
ceased to be a poet when he became a disciple of Socrates; though, as he tells us of
Solon, ‘he might have been one of the greatest of them, if he had not been deterred by
other pursuits’ (Tim.) Thus from many points of view there is an antagonism between
Plato and the poets, which was foreshadowed to him in the old quarrel between
philosophy and poetry. The poets, as he says in the Protagoras, were the Sophists of
their day; and his dislike of the one class is reflected on the other. He regards them both
as the enemies of reasoning and abstraction, though in the case of Euripides more with
reference to his immoral sentiments about tyrants and the like. For Plato is the prophet
who ‘came into the world to convince men’—first of the fallibility of sense and opinion,
and secondly of the reality of abstract ideas. Whatever strangeness there may be in
modern times in opposing philosophy to poetry, which to us seem to have so many
elements in common, the strangeness will disappear if we conceive of poetry as allied to
sense, and of philosophy as equivalent to thought and abstraction. Unfortunately the
very word ‘idea,’ which to Plato is expressive of the most real of all things, is associated
in our minds with an element of subjectiveness and unreality. We may note also how he
differs from Aristotle who declares poetry to be truer than history, for the opposite
reason, because it is concerned with universals, not like history, with particulars (Poet).
The things which are seen are opposed in Scripture to the things which are unseen—
they are equally opposed in Plato to universals and ideas. To him all particulars appear
to be floating about in a world of sense; they have a taint of error or even of evil. There
is no difficulty in seeing that this is an illusion; for there is no more error or variation in
an individual man, horse, bed, etc., than in the class man, horse, bed, etc.; nor is the
truth which is displayed in individual instances less certain than that which is conveyed
through the medium of ideas. But Plato, who is deeply impressed with the real
importance of universals as instruments of thought, attributes to them an essential truth
which is imaginary and unreal; for universals may be often false and particulars true. Had
he attained to any clear conception of the individual, which is the synthesis of the
universal and the particular; or had he been able to distinguish between opinion and
sensation, which the ambiguity of the words (Greek) and the like, tended to confuse, he
would not have denied truth to the particulars of sense.
But the poets are also the representatives of falsehood and feigning in all departments
of life and knowledge, like the sophists and rhetoricians of the Gorgias and Phaedrus;
they are the false priests, false prophets, lying spirits, enchanters of the world. There is
another count put into the indictment against them by Plato, that they are the friends of
the tyrant, and bask in the sunshine of his patronage. Despotism in all ages has had an
apparatus of false ideas and false teachers at its service—in the history of Modern
Europe as well as of Greece and Rome. For no government of men depends solely upon
force; without some corruption of literature and morals—some appeal to the
imagination of the masses—some pretence to the favour of heaven—some element of
good giving power to evil, tyranny, even for a short time, cannot be maintained. The
Greek tyrants were not insensible to the importance of awakening in their cause a
Pseudo–Hellenic feeling; they were proud of successes at the Olympic games; they were
not devoid of the love of literature and art. Plato is thinking in the first instance of Greek
poets who had graced the courts of Dionysius or Archelaus: and the old spirit of
freedom is roused within him at their prostitution of the Tragic Muse in the praises of
tyranny. But his prophetic eye extends beyond them to the false teachers of other ages
who are the creatures of the government under which they live. He compares the
corruption of his contemporaries with the idea of a perfect society, and gathers up into
one mass of evil the evils and errors of mankind; to him they are personified in the
rhetoricians, sophists, poets, rulers who deceive and govern the world.
A further objection which Plato makes to poetry and the imitative arts is that they excite
the emotions. Here the modern reader will be disposed to introduce a distinction which
appears to have escaped him. For the emotions are neither bad nor good in themselves,
and are not most likely to be controlled by the attempt to eradicate them, but by the
moderate indulgence of them. And the vocation of art is to present thought in the form
of feeling, to enlist the feelings on the side of reason, to inspire even for a moment
courage or resignation; perhaps to suggest a sense of infinity and eternity in a way
which mere language is incapable of attaining. True, the same power which in the purer
age of art embodies gods and heroes only, may be made to express the voluptuous
image of a Corinthian courtezan. But this only shows that art, like other outward things,
may be turned to good and also to evil, and is not more closely connected with the
higher than with the lower part of the soul. All imitative art is subject to certain
limitations, and therefore necessarily partakes of the nature of a compromise.
Something of ideal truth is sacrificed for the sake of the representation, and something
in the exactness of the representation is sacrificed to the ideal. Still, works of art have a
permanent element; they idealize and detain the passing thought, and are the
intermediates between sense and ideas.
In the present stage of the human mind, poetry and other forms of fiction may certainly
be regarded as a good. But we can also imagine the existence of an age in which a
severer conception of truth has either banished or transformed them. At any rate we
must admit that they hold a different place at different periods of the world’s history. In
the infancy of mankind, poetry, with the exception of proverbs, is the whole of literature,
and the only instrument of intellectual culture; in modern times she is the shadow or
echo of her former self, and appears to have a precarious existence. Milton in his day
doubted whether an epic poem was any longer possible. At the same time we must
remember, that what Plato would have called the charms of poetry have been partly
transferred to prose; he himself (Statesman) admits rhetoric to be the handmaiden of
Politics, and proposes to find in the strain of law (Laws) a substitute for the old poets.
Among ourselves the creative power seems often to be growing weaker, and scientific
fact to be more engrossing and overpowering to the mind than formerly. The illusion of
the feelings commonly called love, has hitherto been the inspiring influence of modern
poetry and romance, and has exercised a humanizing if not a strengthening influence on
the world. But may not the stimulus which love has given to fancy be some day
exhausted? The modern English novel which is the most popular of all forms of reading
is not more than a century or two old: will the tale of love a hundred years hence, after
so many thousand variations of the same theme, be still received with unabated
interest?
Art cannot claim to be on a level with philosophy or religion, and may often corrupt
them. It is possible to conceive a mental state in which all artistic representations are
regarded as a false and imperfect expression, either of the religious ideal or of the
philosophical ideal. The fairest forms may be revolting in certain moods of mind, as is
proved by the fact that the Mahometans, and many sects of Christians, have renounced
the use of pictures and images. The beginning of a great religion, whether Christian or
Gentile, has not been ‘wood or stone,’ but a spirit moving in the hearts of men. The
disciples have met in a large upper room or in ‘holes and caves of the earth’; in the
second or third generation, they have had mosques, temples, churches, monasteries.
And the revival or reform of religions, like the first revelation of them, has come from
within and has generally disregarded external ceremonies and accompaniments.
But poetry and art may also be the expression of the highest truth and the purest
sentiment. Plato himself seems to waver between two opposite views —when, as in the
third Book, he insists that youth should be brought up amid wholesome imagery; and
again in Book X, when he banishes the poets from his Republic. Admitting that the arts,
which some of us almost deify, have fallen short of their higher aim, we must admit on
the other hand that to banish imagination wholly would be suicidal as well as
impossible. For nature too is a form of art; and a breath of the fresh air or a single
glance at the varying landscape would in an instant revive and reillumine the
extinguished spark of poetry in the human breast. In the lower stages of civilization
imagination more than reason distinguishes man from the animals; and to banish art
would be to banish thought, to banish language, to banish the expression of all truth.
No religion is wholly devoid of external forms; even the Mahometan who renounces the
use of pictures and images has a temple in which he worships the Most High, as solemn
and beautiful as any Greek or Christian building. Feeling too and thought are not really
opposed; for he who thinks must feel before he can execute. And the highest thoughts,
when they become familiarized to us, are always tending to pass into the form of
feeling.
Plato does not seriously intend to expel poets from life and society. But he feels strongly
the unreality of their writings; he is protesting against the degeneracy of poetry in his
own day as we might protest against the want of serious purpose in modern fiction,
against the unseemliness or extravagance of some of our poets or novelists, against the
time-serving of preachers or public writers, against the regardlessness of truth which to
the eye of the philosopher seems to characterize the greater part of the world. For we
too have reason to complain that our poets and novelists ‘paint inferior truth’ and ‘are
concerned with the inferior part of the soul’; that the readers of them become what they
read and are injuriously affected by them. And we look in vain for that healthy
atmosphere of which Plato speaks,—‘the beauty which meets the sense like a breeze
and imperceptibly draws the soul, even in childhood, into harmony with the beauty of
reason.’
For there might be a poetry which would be the hymn of divine perfection, the harmony
of goodness and truth among men: a strain which should renew the youth of the world,
and bring back the ages in which the poet was man’s only teacher and best friend,—
which would find materials in the living present as well as in the romance of the past,
and might subdue to the fairest forms of speech and verse the intractable materials of
modern civilisation,—which might elicit the simple principles, or, as Plato would have
called them, the essential forms, of truth and justice out of the variety of opinion and
the complexity of modern society,—which would preserve all the good of each
generation and leave the bad unsung,—which should be based not on vain longings or
faint imaginings, but on a clear insight into the nature of man. Then the tale of love
might begin again in poetry or prose, two in one, united in the pursuit of knowledge, or
the service of God and man; and feelings of love might still be the incentive to great
thoughts and heroic deeds as in the days of Dante or Petrarch; and many types of manly
and womanly beauty might appear among us, rising above the ordinary level of
humanity, and many lives which were like poems (Laws), be not only written, but lived by
us. A few such strains have been heard among men in the tragedies of Aeschylus and
Sophocles, whom Plato quotes, not, as Homer is quoted by him, in irony, but with deep
and serious approval,—in the poetry of Milton and Wordsworth, and in passages of
other English poets,—first and above all in the Hebrew prophets and psalmists.
Shakespeare has taught us how great men should speak and act; he has drawn
characters of a wonderful purity and depth; he has ennobled the human mind, but, like
Homer (Rep.), he ‘has left no way of life.’ The next greatest poet of modern times,
Goethe, is concerned with ‘a lower degree of truth’; he paints the world as a stage on
which ‘all the men and women are merely players’; he cultivates life as an art, but he
furnishes no ideals of truth and action. The poet may rebel against any attempt to set
limits to his fancy; and he may argue truly that moralizing in verse is not poetry.
Possibly, like Mephistopheles in Faust, he may retaliate on his adversaries. But the
philosopher will still be justified in asking, ‘How may the heavenly gift of poesy be
devoted to the good of mankind?’
Returning to Plato, we may observe that a similar mixture of truth and error appears in
other parts of the argument. He is aware of the absurdity of mankind framing their
whole lives according to Homer; just as in the Phaedrus he intimates the absurdity of
interpreting mythology upon rational principles; both these were the modern
tendencies of his own age, which he deservedly ridicules. On the other hand, his
argument that Homer, if he had been able to teach mankind anything worth knowing,
would not have been allowed by them to go about begging as a rhapsodist, is both
false and contrary to the spirit of Plato (Rep.). It may be compared with those other
paradoxes of the Gorgias, that ‘No statesman was ever unjustly put to death by the city
of which he was the head’; and that ‘No Sophist was ever defrauded by his pupils’
(Gorg.)...
The argument for immortality seems to rest on the absolute dualism of soul and body.
Admitting the existence of the soul, we know of no force which is able to put an end to
her. Vice is her own proper evil; and if she cannot be destroyed by that, she cannot be
destroyed by any other. Yet Plato has acknowledged that the soul may be so overgrown
by the incrustations of earth as to lose her original form; and in the Timaeus he
recognizes more strongly than in the Republic the influence which the body has over the
mind, denying even the voluntariness of human actions, on the ground that they
proceed from physical states (Tim.). In the Republic, as elsewhere, he wavers between
the original soul which has to be restored, and the character which is developed by
training and education...
The vision of another world is ascribed to Er, the son of Armenius, who is said by
Clement of Alexandria to have been Zoroaster. The tale has certainly an oriental
character, and may be compared with the pilgrimages of the soul in the Zend Avesta
(Haug, Avesta). But no trace of acquaintance with Zoroaster is found elsewhere in Plato’s
writings, and there is no reason for giving him the name of Er the Pamphylian. The
philosophy of Heracleitus cannot be shown to be borrowed from Zoroaster, and still less
the myths of Plato.
The local arrangement of the vision is less distinct than that of the Phaedrus and
Phaedo. Astronomy is mingled with symbolism and mythology; the great sphere of
heaven is represented under the symbol of a cylinder or box, containing the seven orbits
of the planets and the fixed stars; this is suspended from an axis or spindle which turns
on the knees of Necessity; the revolutions of the seven orbits contained in the cylinder
are guided by the fates, and their harmonious motion produces the music of the
spheres. Through the innermost or eighth of these, which is the moon, is passed the
spindle; but it is doubtful whether this is the continuation of the column of light, from
which the pilgrims contemplate the heavens; the words of Plato imply that they are
connected, but not the same. The column itself is clearly not of adamant. The spindle
(which is of adamant) is fastened to the ends of the chains which extend to the middle
of the column of light—this column is said to hold together the heaven; but whether it
hangs from the spindle, or is at right angles to it, is not explained. The cylinder
containing the orbits of the stars is almost as much a symbol as the figure of Necessity
turning the spindle;—for the outermost rim is the sphere of the fixed stars, and nothing
is said about the intervals of space which divide the paths of the stars in the heavens.
The description is both a picture and an orrery, and therefore is necessarily inconsistent
with itself. The column of light is not the Milky Way—which is neither straight, nor like a
rainbow—but the imaginary axis of the earth. This is compared to the rainbow in respect
not of form but of colour, and not to the undergirders of a trireme, but to the straight
rope running from prow to stern in which the undergirders meet.
The orrery or picture of the heavens given in the Republic differs in its mode of
representation from the circles of the same and of the other in the Timaeus. In both the
fixed stars are distinguished from the planets, and they move in orbits without them,
although in an opposite direction: in the Republic as in the Timaeus they are all moving
round the axis of the world. But we are not certain that in the former they are moving
round the earth. No distinct mention is made in the Republic of the circles of the same
and other; although both in the Timaeus and in the Republic the motion of the fixed
stars is supposed to coincide with the motion of the whole. The relative thickness of the
rims is perhaps designed to express the relative distances of the planets. Plato probably
intended to represent the earth, from which Er and his companions are viewing the
heavens, as stationary in place; but whether or not herself revolving, unless this is
implied in the revolution of the axis, is uncertain (Timaeus). The spectator may be
supposed to look at the heavenly bodies, either from above or below. The earth is a sort
of earth and heaven in one, like the heaven of the Phaedrus, on the back of which the
spectator goes out to take a peep at the stars and is borne round in the revolution.
There is no distinction between the equator and the ecliptic. But Plato is no doubt led to
imagine that the planets have an opposite motion to that of the fixed stars, in order to
account for their appearances in the heavens. In the description of the meadow, and the
retribution of the good and evil after death, there are traces of Homer.
The description of the axis as a spindle, and of the heavenly bodies as forming a whole,
partly arises out of the attempt to connect the motions of the heavenly bodies with the
mythological image of the web, or weaving of the Fates. The giving of the lots, the
weaving of them, and the making of them irreversible, which are ascribed to the three
Fates—Lachesis, Clotho, Atropos, are obviously derived from their names. The element
of chance in human life is indicated by the order of the lots. But chance, however
adverse, may be overcome by the wisdom of man, if he knows how to choose aright;
there is a worse enemy to man than chance; this enemy is himself. He who was
moderately fortunate in the number of the lot—even the very last comer—might have a
good life if he chose with wisdom. And as Plato does not like to make an assertion
which is unproven, he more than confirms this statement a few sentences afterwards by
the example of Odysseus, who chose last. But the virtue which is founded on habit is not
sufficient to enable a man to choose; he must add to virtue knowledge, if he is to act
rightly when placed in new circumstances. The routine of good actions and good habits
is an inferior sort of goodness; and, as Coleridge says, ‘Common sense is intolerable
which is not based on metaphysics,’ so Plato would have said, ‘Habit is worthless which
is not based upon philosophy.’
The freedom of the will to refuse the evil and to choose the good is distinctly asserted.
‘Virtue is free, and as a man honours or dishonours her he will have more or less of her.’
The life of man is ‘rounded’ by necessity; there are circumstances prior to birth which
affect him (Pol.). But within the walls of necessity there is an open space in which he is
his own master, and can study for himself the effects which the variously compounded
gifts of nature or fortune have upon the soul, and act accordingly. All men cannot have
the first choice in everything. But the lot of all men is good enough, if they choose
wisely and will live diligently.
The verisimilitude which is given to the pilgrimage of a thousand years, by the
intimation that Ardiaeus had lived a thousand years before; the coincidence of Er
coming to life on the twelfth day after he was supposed to have been dead with the
seven days which the pilgrims passed in the meadow, and the four days during which
they journeyed to the column of light; the precision with which the soul is mentioned
who chose the twentieth lot; the passing remarks that there was no definite character
among the souls, and that the souls which had chosen ill blamed any one rather than
themselves; or that some of the souls drank more than was necessary of the waters of
Forgetfulness, while Er himself was hindered from drinking; the desire of Odysseus to
rest at last, unlike the conception of him in Dante and Tennyson; the feigned ignorance
of how Er returned to the body, when the other souls went shooting like stars to their
birth,—add greatly to the probability of the narrative. They are such touches of nature
as the art of Defoe might have introduced when he wished to win credibility for marvels
and apparitions.
There still remain to be considered some points which have been intentionally reserved
to the end: (1) the Janus-like character of the Republic, which presents two faces—one
an Hellenic state, the other a kingdom of philosophers. Connected with the latter of the
two aspects are (2) the paradoxes of the Republic, as they have been termed by
Morgenstern: (a) the community of property ; (b) of families; (c) the rule of philosophers;
(d) the analogy of the individual and the State, which, like some other analogies in the
Republic, is carried too far. We may then proceed to consider (3) the subject of
education as conceived by Plato, bringing together in a general view the education of
youth and the education of after-life; (4) we may note further some essential differences
between ancient and modern politics which are suggested by the Republic; (5) we may
compare the Politicus and the Laws; (6) we may observe the influence exercised by Plato
on his imitators; and (7) take occasion to consider the nature and value of political, and
(8) of religious ideals.
1. Plato expressly says that he is intending to found an Hellenic State (Book V). Many of
his regulations are characteristically Spartan; such as the prohibition of gold and silver,
the common meals of the men, the military training of the youth, the gymnastic
exercises of the women. The life of Sparta was the life of a camp (Laws), enforced even
more rigidly in time of peace than in war; the citizens of Sparta, like Plato’s, were
forbidden to trade—they were to be soldiers and not shopkeepers. Nowhere else in
Greece was the individual so completely subjected to the State; the time when he was to
marry, the education of his children, the clothes which he was to wear, the food which
he was to eat, were all prescribed by law. Some of the best enactments in the Republic,
such as the reverence to be paid to parents and elders, and some of the worst, such as
the exposure of deformed children, are borrowed from the practice of Sparta. The
encouragement of friendships between men and youths, or of men with one another, as
affording incentives to bravery, is also Spartan; in Sparta too a nearer approach was
made than in any other Greek State to equality of the sexes, and to community of
property; and while there was probably less of licentiousness in the sense of immorality,
the tie of marriage was regarded more lightly than in the rest of Greece. The ‘suprema
lex’ was the preservation of the family, and the interest of the State. The coarse strength
of a military government was not favourable to purity and refinement; and the excessive
strictness of some regulations seems to have produced a reaction. Of all Hellenes the
Spartans were most accessible to bribery; several of the greatest of them might be
described in the words of Plato as having a ‘fierce secret longing after gold and silver.’
Though not in the strict sense communists, the principle of communism was maintained
among them in their division of lands, in their common meals, in their slaves, and in the
free use of one another’s goods. Marriage was a public institution: and the women were
educated by the State, and sang and danced in public with the men.
Many traditions were preserved at Sparta of the severity with which the magistrates had
maintained the primitive rule of music and poetry; as in the Republic of Plato, the newfangled
poet was to be expelled. Hymns to the Gods, which are the only kind of music
admitted into the ideal State, were the only kind which was permitted at Sparta. The
Spartans, though an unpoetical race, were nevertheless lovers of poetry; they had been
stirred by the Elegiac strains of Tyrtaeus, they had crowded around Hippias to hear his
recitals of Homer; but in this they resembled the citizens of the timocratic rather than of
the ideal State. The council of elder men also corresponds to the Spartan gerousia; and
the freedom with which they are permitted to judge about matters of detail agrees with
what we are told of that institution. Once more, the military rule of not spoiling the dead
or offering arms at the temples; the moderation in the pursuit of enemies; the
importance attached to the physical well-being of the citizens; the use of warfare for the
sake of defence rather than of aggression—are features probably suggested by the
spirit and practice of Sparta.
To the Spartan type the ideal State reverts in the first decline; and the character of the
individual timocrat is borrowed from the Spartan citizen. The love of Lacedaemon not
only affected Plato and Xenophon, but was shared by many undistinguished Athenians;
there they seemed to find a principle which was wanting in their own democracy. The
(Greek) of the Spartans attracted them, that is to say, not the goodness of their laws, but
the spirit of order and loyalty which prevailed. Fascinated by the idea, citizens of Athens
would imitate the Lacedaemonians in their dress and manners; they were known to the
contemporaries of Plato as ‘the persons who had their ears bruised,’ like the
Roundheads of the Commonwealth. The love of another church or country when seen at
a distance only, the longing for an imaginary simplicity in civilized times, the fond desire
of a past which never has been, or of a future which never will be,—these are aspirations
of the human mind which are often felt among ourselves. Such feelings meet with a
response in the Republic of Plato.
But there are other features of the Platonic Republic, as, for example, the literary and
philosophical education, and the grace and beauty of life, which are the reverse of
Spartan. Plato wishes to give his citizens a taste of Athenian freedom as well as of
Lacedaemonian discipline. His individual genius is purely Athenian, although in theory
he is a lover of Sparta; and he is something more than either—he has also a true
Hellenic feeling. He is desirous of humanizing the wars of Hellenes against one another;
he acknowledges that the Delphian God is the grand hereditary interpreter of all Hellas.
The spirit of harmony and the Dorian mode are to prevail, and the whole State is to have
an external beauty which is the reflex of the harmony within. But he has not yet found
out the truth which he afterwards enunciated in the Laws—that he was a better
legislator who made men to be of one mind, than he who trained them for war. The
citizens, as in other Hellenic States, democratic as well as aristocratic, are really an upper
class; for, although no mention is made of slaves, the lower classes are allowed to fade
away into the distance, and are represented in the individual by the passions. Plato has
no idea either of a social State in which all classes are harmonized, or of a federation of
Hellas or the world in which different nations or States have a place. His city is equipped
for war rather than for peace, and this would seem to be justified by the ordinary
condition of Hellenic States. The myth of the earth-born men is an embodiment of the
orthodox tradition of Hellas, and the allusion to the four ages of the world is also
sanctioned by the authority of Hesiod and the poets. Thus we see that the Republic is
partly founded on the ideal of the old Greek polis, partly on the actual circumstances of
Hellas in that age. Plato, like the old painters, retains the traditional form, and like them
he has also a vision of a city in the clouds.
There is yet another thread which is interwoven in the texture of the work; for the
Republic is not only a Dorian State, but a Pythagorean league. The ‘way of life’ which
was connected with the name of Pythagoras, like the Catholic monastic orders, showed
the power which the mind of an individual might exercise over his contemporaries, and
may have naturally suggested to Plato the possibility of reviving such ‘mediaeval
institutions.’ The Pythagoreans, like Plato, enforced a rule of life and a moral and
intellectual training. The influence ascribed to music, which to us seems exaggerated, is
also a Pythagorean feature; it is not to be regarded as representing the real influence of
music in the Greek world. More nearly than any other government of Hellas, the
Pythagorean league of three hundred was an aristocracy of virtue. For once in the
history of mankind the philosophy of order or (Greek), expressing and consequently
enlisting on its side the combined endeavours of the better part of the people, obtained
the management of public affairs and held possession of it for a considerable time (until
about B.C. 500). Probably only in States prepared by Dorian institutions would such a
league have been possible. The rulers, like Plato’s (Greek), were required to submit to a
severe training in order to prepare the way for the education of the other members of
the community. Long after the dissolution of the Order, eminent Pythagoreans, such as
Archytas of Tarentum, retained their political influence over the cities of Magna Graecia.
There was much here that was suggestive to the kindred spirit of Plato, who had
doubtless meditated deeply on the ‘way of life of Pythagoras’ (Rep.) and his followers.
Slight traces of Pythagoreanism are to be found in the mystical number of the State, in
the number which expresses the interval between the king and the tyrant, in the
doctrine of transmigration, in the music of the spheres, as well as in the great though
secondary importance ascribed to mathematics in education.
But as in his philosophy, so also in the form of his State, he goes far beyond the old
Pythagoreans. He attempts a task really impossible, which is to unite the past of Greek
history with the future of philosophy, analogous to that other impossibility, which has
often been the dream of Christendom, the attempt to unite the past history of Europe
with the kingdom of Christ. Nothing actually existing in the world at all resembles Plato’s
ideal State; nor does he himself imagine that such a State is possible. This he repeats
again and again; e.g. in the Republic, or in the Laws where, casting a glance back on the
Republic, he admits that the perfect state of communism and philosophy was
impossible in his own age, though still to be retained as a pattern. The same doubt is
implied in the earnestness with which he argues in the Republic that ideals are none the
worse because they cannot be realized in fact, and in the chorus of laughter, which like a
breaking wave will, as he anticipates, greet the mention of his proposals; though like
other writers of fiction, he uses all his art to give reality to his inventions. When asked
how the ideal polity can come into being, he answers ironically, ‘When one son of a king
becomes a philosopher’; he designates the fiction of the earth-born men as ‘a noble lie’;
and when the structure is finally complete, he fairly tells you that his Republic is a vision
only, which in some sense may have reality, but not in the vulgar one of a reign of
philosophers upon earth. It has been said that Plato flies as well as walks, but this falls
short of the truth; for he flies and walks at the same time, and is in the air and on firm
ground in successive instants.
Niebuhr has asked a trifling question, which may be briefly noticed in this place—Was
Plato a good citizen? If by this is meant, Was he loyal to Athenian institutions?—he can
hardly be said to be the friend of democracy: but neither is he the friend of any other
existing form of government; all of them he regarded as ‘states of faction’ (Laws); none
attained to his ideal of a voluntary rule over voluntary subjects, which seems indeed
more nearly to describe democracy than any other; and the worst of them is tyranny.
The truth is, that the question has hardly any meaning when applied to a great
philosopher whose writings are not meant for a particular age and country, but for all
time and all mankind. The decline of Athenian politics was probably the motive which
led Plato to frame an ideal State, and the Republic may be regarded as reflecting the
departing glory of Hellas. As well might we complain of St. Augustine, whose great work
‘The City of God’ originated in a similar motive, for not being loyal to the Roman Empire.
Even a nearer parallel might be afforded by the first Christians, who cannot fairly be
charged with being bad citizens because, though ‘subject to the higher powers,’ they
were looking forward to a city which is in heaven.
2. The idea of the perfect State is full of paradox when judged of according to the
ordinary notions of mankind. The paradoxes of one age have been said to become the
commonplaces of the next; but the paradoxes of Plato are at least as paradoxical to us
as they were to his contemporaries. The modern world has either sneered at them as
absurd, or denounced them as unnatural and immoral; men have been pleased to find
in Aristotle’s criticisms of them the anticipation of their own good sense. The wealthy
and cultivated classes have disliked and also dreaded them; they have pointed with
satisfaction to the failure of efforts to realize them in practice. Yet since they are the
thoughts of one of the greatest of human intelligences, and of one who had done most
to elevate morality and religion, they seem to deserve a better treatment at our hands.
We may have to address the public, as Plato does poetry, and assure them that we
mean no harm to existing institutions. There are serious errors which have a side of truth
and which therefore may fairly demand a careful consideration: there are truths mixed
with error of which we may indeed say, ‘The half is better than the whole.’ Yet ‘the half’
may be an important contribution to the study of human nature.
(a) The first paradox is the community of goods, which is mentioned slightly at the end
of the third Book, and seemingly, as Aristotle observes, is confined to the guardians; at
least no mention is made of the other classes. But the omission is not of any real
significance, and probably arises out of the plan of the work, which prevents the writer
from entering into details.
Aristotle censures the community of property much in the spirit of modern political
economy, as tending to repress industry, and as doing away with the spirit of
benevolence. Modern writers almost refuse to consider the subject, which is supposed
to have been long ago settled by the common opinion of mankind. But it must be
remembered that the sacredness of property is a notion far more fixed in modern than
in ancient times. The world has grown older, and is therefore more conservative.
Primitive society offered many examples of land held in common, either by a tribe or by
a township, and such may probably have been the original form of landed tenure.
Ancient legislators had invented various modes of dividing and preserving the divisions
of land among the citizens; according to Aristotle there were nations who held the land
in common and divided the produce, and there were others who divided the land and
stored the produce in common. The evils of debt and the inequality of property were far
greater in ancient than in modern times, and the accidents to which property was
subject from war, or revolution, or taxation, or other legislative interference, were also
greater. All these circumstances gave property a less fixed and sacred character. The
early Christians are believed to have held their property in common, and the principle is
sanctioned by the words of Christ himself, and has been maintained as a counsel of
perfection in almost all ages of the Church. Nor have there been wanting instances of
modern enthusiasts who have made a religion of communism; in every age of religious
excitement notions like Wycliffe’s ‘inheritance of grace’ have tended to prevail. A like
spirit, but fiercer and more violent, has appeared in politics. ‘The preparation of the
Gospel of peace’ soon becomes the red flag of Republicanism.
We can hardly judge what effect Plato’s views would have upon his own
contemporaries; they would perhaps have seemed to them only an exaggeration of the
Spartan commonwealth. Even modern writers would acknowledge that the right of
private property is based on expediency, and may be interfered with in a variety of ways
for the public good. Any other mode of vesting property which was found to be more
advantageous, would in time acquire the same basis of right; ‘the most useful,’ in Plato’s
words, ‘would be the most sacred.’ The lawyers and ecclesiastics of former ages would
have spoken of property as a sacred institution. But they only meant by such language
to oppose the greatest amount of resistance to any invasion of the rights of individuals
and of the Church.
When we consider the question, without any fear of immediate application to practice,
in the spirit of Plato’s Republic, are we quite sure that the received notions of property
are the best? Is the distribution of wealth which is customary in civilized countries the
most favourable that can be conceived for the education and development of the mass
of mankind? Can ‘the spectator of all time and all existence’ be quite convinced that one
or two thousand years hence, great changes will not have taken place in the rights of
property, or even that the very notion of property, beyond what is necessary for
personal maintenance, may not have disappeared? This was a distinction familiar to
Aristotle, though likely to be laughed at among ourselves. Such a change would not be
greater than some other changes through which the world has passed in the transition
from ancient to modern society, for example, the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, or
the abolition of slavery in America and the West Indies; and not so great as the
difference which separates the Eastern village community from the Western world. To
accomplish such a revolution in the course of a few centuries, would imply a rate of
progress not more rapid than has actually taken place during the last fifty or sixty years.
The kingdom of Japan underwent more change in five or six years than Europe in five or
six hundred. Many opinions and beliefs which have been cherished among ourselves
quite as strongly as the sacredness of property have passed away; and the most
untenable propositions respecting the right of bequests or entail have been maintained
with as much fervour as the most moderate. Some one will be heard to ask whether a
state of society can be final in which the interests of thousands are perilled on the life or
character of a single person. And many will indulge the hope that our present condition
may, after all, be only transitional, and may conduct to a higher, in which property,
besides ministering to the enjoyment of the few, may also furnish the means of the
highest culture to all, and will be a greater benefit to the public generally, and also more
under the control of public authority. There may come a time when the saying, ‘Have I
not a right to do what I will with my own?’ will appear to be a barbarous relic of
individualism;— when the possession of a part may be a greater blessing to each and all
than the possession of the whole is now to any one.
Such reflections appear visionary to the eye of the practical statesman, but they are
within the range of possibility to the philosopher. He can imagine that in some distant
age or clime, and through the influence of some individual, the notion of common
property may or might have sunk as deep into the heart of a race, and have become as
fixed to them, as private property is to ourselves. He knows that this latter institution is
not more than four or five thousand years old: may not the end revert to the beginning?
In our own age even Utopias affect the spirit of legislation, and an abstract idea may
exercise a great influence on practical politics.
The objections that would be generally urged against Plato’s community of property, are
the old ones of Aristotle, that motives for exertion would be taken away, and that
disputes would arise when each was dependent upon all. Every man would produce as
little and consume as much as he liked. The experience of civilized nations has hitherto
been adverse to Socialism. The effort is too great for human nature; men try to live in
common, but the personal feeling is always breaking in. On the other hand it may be
doubted whether our present notions of property are not conventional, for they differ in
different countries and in different states of society. We boast of an individualism which
is not freedom, but rather an artificial result of the industrial state of modern Europe.
The individual is nominally free, but he is also powerless in a world bound hand and foot
in the chains of economic necessity. Even if we cannot expect the mass of mankind to
become disinterested, at any rate we observe in them a power of organization which
fifty years ago would never have been suspected. The same forces which have
revolutionized the political system of Europe, may effect a similar change in the social
and industrial relations of mankind. And if we suppose the influence of some good as
well as neutral motives working in the community, there will be no absurdity in
expecting that the mass of mankind having power, and becoming enlightened about
the higher possibilities of human life, when they learn how much more is attainable for
all than is at present the possession of a favoured few, may pursue the common interest
with an intelligence and persistency which mankind have hitherto never seen.
Now that the world has once been set in motion, and is no longer held fast under the
tyranny of custom and ignorance; now that criticism has pierced the veil of tradition and
the past no longer overpowers the present,—the progress of civilization may be
expected to be far greater and swifter than heretofore. Even at our present rate of speed
the point at which we may arrive in two or three generations is beyond the power of
imagination to foresee. There are forces in the world which work, not in an arithmetical,
but in a geometrical ratio of increase. Education, to use the expression of Plato, moves
like a wheel with an ever-multiplying rapidity. Nor can we say how great may be its
influence, when it becomes universal,—when it has been inherited by many
generations,—when it is freed from the trammels of superstition and rightly adapted to
the wants and capacities of different classes of men and women. Neither do we know
how much more the co-operation of minds or of hands may be capable of
accomplishing, whether in labour or in study. The resources of the natural sciences are
not half-developed as yet; the soil of the earth, instead of growing more barren, may
become many times more fertile than hitherto; the uses of machinery far greater, and
also more minute than at present. New secrets of physiology may be revealed, deeply
affecting human nature in its innermost recesses. The standard of health may be raised
and the lives of men prolonged by sanitary and medical knowledge. There may be
peace, there may be leisure, there may be innocent refreshments of many kinds. The
ever-increasing power of locomotion may join the extremes of earth. There may be
mysterious workings of the human mind, such as occur only at great crises of history.
The East and the West may meet together, and all nations may contribute their thoughts
and their experience to the common stock of humanity. Many other elements enter into
a speculation of this kind. But it is better to make an end of them. For such reflections
appear to the majority far-fetched, and to men of science, commonplace.
(b) Neither to the mind of Plato nor of Aristotle did the doctrine of community of
property present at all the same difficulty, or appear to be the same violation of the
common Hellenic sentiment, as the community of wives and children. This paradox he
prefaces by another proposal, that the occupations of men and women shall be the
same, and that to this end they shall have a common training and education. Male and
female animals have the same pursuits—why not also the two sexes of man?
But have we not here fallen into a contradiction? for we were saying that different
natures should have different pursuits. How then can men and women have the same?
And is not the proposal inconsistent with our notion of the division of labour?—These
objections are no sooner raised than answered; for, according to Plato, there is no
organic difference between men and women, but only the accidental one that men
beget and women bear children. Following the analogy of the other animals, he
contends that all natural gifts are scattered about indifferently among both sexes,
though there may be a superiority of degree on the part of the men. The objection on
the score of decency to their taking part in the same gymnastic exercises, is met by
Plato’s assertion that the existing feeling is a matter of habit.
That Plato should have emancipated himself from the ideas of his own country and from
the example of the East, shows a wonderful independence of mind. He is conscious that
women are half the human race, in some respects the more important half (Laws); and
for the sake both of men and women he desires to raise the woman to a higher level of
existence. He brings, not sentiment, but philosophy to bear upon a question which both
in ancient and modern times has been chiefly regarded in the light of custom or feeling.
The Greeks had noble conceptions of womanhood in the goddesses Athene and
Artemis, and in the heroines Antigone and Andromache. But these ideals had no
counterpart in actual life. The Athenian woman was in no way the equal of her husband;
she was not the entertainer of his guests or the mistress of his house, but only his
housekeeper and the mother of his children. She took no part in military or political
matters; nor is there any instance in the later ages of Greece of a woman becoming
famous in literature. ‘Hers is the greatest glory who has the least renown among men,’ is
the historian’s conception of feminine excellence. A very different ideal of womanhood
is held up by Plato to the world; she is to be the companion of the man, and to share
with him in the toils of war and in the cares of government. She is to be similarly trained
both in bodily and mental exercises. She is to lose as far as possible the incidents of
maternity and the characteristics of the female sex.
The modern antagonist of the equality of the sexes would argue that the differences
between men and women are not confined to the single point urged by Plato; that
sensibility, gentleness, grace, are the qualities of women, while energy, strength, higher
intelligence, are to be looked for in men. And the criticism is just: the differences affect
the whole nature, and are not, as Plato supposes, confined to a single point. But neither
can we say how far these differences are due to education and the opinions of mankind,
or physically inherited from the habits and opinions of former generations. Women have
been always taught, not exactly that they are slaves, but that they are in an inferior
position, which is also supposed to have compensating advantages; and to this position
they have conformed. It is also true that the physical form may easily change in the
course of generations through the mode of life; and the weakness or delicacy, which was
once a matter of opinion, may become a physical fact. The characteristics of sex vary
greatly in different countries and ranks of society, and at different ages in the same
individuals. Plato may have been right in denying that there was any ultimate difference
in the sexes of man other than that which exists in animals, because all other differences
may be conceived to disappear in other states of society, or under different
circumstances of life and training.
The first wave having been passed, we proceed to the second—community of wives and
children. ‘Is it possible? Is it desirable?’ For as Glaucon intimates, and as we far more
strongly insist, ‘Great doubts may be entertained about both these points.’ Any free
discussion of the question is impossible, and mankind are perhaps right in not allowing
the ultimate bases of social life to be examined. Few of us can safely enquire into the
things which nature hides, any more than we can dissect our own bodies. Still, the
manner in which Plato arrived at his conclusions should be considered. For here, as Mr.
Grote has remarked, is a wonderful thing, that one of the wisest and best of men should
have entertained ideas of morality which are wholly at variance with our own. And if we
would do Plato justice, we must examine carefully the character of his proposals. First,
we may observe that the relations of the sexes supposed by him are the reverse of
licentious: he seems rather to aim at an impossible strictness. Secondly, he conceives the
family to be the natural enemy of the state; and he entertains the serious hope that an
universal brotherhood may take the place of private interests—an aspiration which,
although not justified by experience, has possessed many noble minds. On the other
hand, there is no sentiment or imagination in the connections which men and women
are supposed by him to form; human beings return to the level of the animals, neither
exalting to heaven, nor yet abusing the natural instincts. All that world of poetry and
fancy which the passion of love has called forth in modern literature and romance would
have been banished by Plato. The arrangements of marriage in the Republic are directed
to one object— the improvement of the race. In successive generations a great
development both of bodily and mental qualities might be possible. The analogy of
animals tends to show that mankind can within certain limits receive a change of nature.
And as in animals we should commonly choose the best for breeding, and destroy the
others, so there must be a selection made of the human beings whose lives are worthy
to be preserved.
We start back horrified from this Platonic ideal, in the belief, first, that the higher
feelings of humanity are far too strong to be crushed out; secondly, that if the plan
could be carried into execution we should be poorly recompensed by improvements in
the breed for the loss of the best things in life. The greatest regard for the weakest and
meanest of human beings—the infant, the criminal, the insane, the idiot, truly seems to
us one of the noblest results of Christianity. We have learned, though as yet imperfectly,
that the individual man has an endless value in the sight of God, and that we honour
Him when we honour the darkened and disfigured image of Him (Laws). This is the
lesson which Christ taught in a parable when He said, ‘Their angels do always behold the
face of My Father which is in heaven.’ Such lessons are only partially realized in any age;
they were foreign to the age of Plato, as they have very different degrees of strength in
different countries or ages of the Christian world. To the Greek the family was a religious
and customary institution binding the members together by a tie inferior in strength to
that of friendship, and having a less solemn and sacred sound than that of country. The
relationship which existed on the lower level of custom, Plato imagined that he was
raising to the higher level of nature and reason; while from the modern and Christian
point of view we regard him as sanctioning murder and destroying the first principles of
morality.
The great error in these and similar speculations is that the difference between man and
the animals is forgotten in them. The human being is regarded with the eye of a dog—
or bird-fancier, or at best of a slave-owner; the higher or human qualities are left out.
The breeder of animals aims chiefly at size or speed or strength; in a few cases at
courage or temper; most often the fitness of the animal for food is the great
desideratum. But mankind are not bred to be eaten, nor yet for their superiority in
fighting or in running or in drawing carts. Neither does the improvement of the human
race consist merely in the increase of the bones and flesh, but in the growth and
enlightenment of the mind. Hence there must be ‘a marriage of true minds’ as well as of
bodies, of imagination and reason as well as of lusts and instincts. Men and women
without feeling or imagination are justly called brutes; yet Plato takes away these
qualities and puts nothing in their place, not even the desire of a noble offspring, since
parents are not to know their own children. The most important transaction of social life,
he who is the idealist philosopher converts into the most brutal. For the pair are to have
no relation to one another, except at the hymeneal festival; their children are not theirs,
but the state’s; nor is any tie of affection to unite them. Yet here the analogy of the
animals might have saved Plato from a gigantic error, if he had ‘not lost sight of his own
illustration.’ For the ‘nobler sort of birds and beasts’ nourish and protect their offspring
and are faithful to one another.
An eminent physiologist thinks it worth while ‘to try and place life on a physical basis.’
But should not life rest on the moral rather than upon the physical? The higher comes
first, then the lower, first the human and rational, afterwards the animal. Yet they are not
absolutely divided; and in times of sickness or moments of self-indulgence they seem to
be only different aspects of a common human nature which includes them both. Neither
is the moral the limit of the physical, but the expansion and enlargement of it,—the
highest form which the physical is capable of receiving. As Plato would say, the body
does not take care of the body, and still less of the mind, but the mind takes care of
both. In all human action not that which is common to man and the animals is the
characteristic element, but that which distinguishes him from them. Even if we admit the
physical basis, and resolve all virtue into health of body ‘la facon que notre sang circule,’
still on merely physical grounds we must come back to ideas. Mind and reason and duty
and conscience, under these or other names, are always reappearing. There cannot be
health of body without health of mind; nor health of mind without the sense of duty and
the love of truth (Charm).
That the greatest of ancient philosophers should in his regulations about marriage have
fallen into the error of separating body and mind, does indeed appear surprising. Yet
the wonder is not so much that Plato should have entertained ideas of morality which to
our own age are revolting, but that he should have contradicted himself to an extent
which is hardly credible, falling in an instant from the heaven of idealism into the
crudest animalism. Rejoicing in the newly found gift of reflection, he appears to have
thought out a subject about which he had better have followed the enlightened feeling
of his own age. The general sentiment of Hellas was opposed to his monstrous fancy.
The old poets, and in later time the tragedians, showed no want of respect for the
family, on which much of their religion was based. But the example of Sparta, and
perhaps in some degree the tendency to defy public opinion, seems to have misled him.
He will make one family out of all the families of the state. He will select the finest
specimens of men and women and breed from these only.
Yet because the illusion is always returning (for the animal part of human nature will
from time to time assert itself in the disguise of philosophy as well as of poetry), and
also because any departure from established morality, even where this is not intended,
is apt to be unsettling, it may be worth while to draw out a little more at length the
objections to the Platonic marriage. In the first place, history shows that wherever
polygamy has been largely allowed the race has deteriorated. One man to one woman is
the law of God and nature. Nearly all the civilized peoples of the world at some period
before the age of written records, have become monogamists; and the step when once
taken has never been retraced. The exceptions occurring among Brahmins or
Mahometans or the ancient Persians, are of that sort which may be said to prove the
rule. The connexions formed between superior and inferior races hardly ever produce a
noble offspring, because they are licentious; and because the children in such cases
usually despise the mother and are neglected by the father who is ashamed of them.
Barbarous nations when they are introduced by Europeans to vice die out; polygamist
peoples either import and adopt children from other countries, or dwindle in numbers,
or both. Dynasties and aristocracies which have disregarded the laws of nature have
decreased in numbers and degenerated in stature; ‘mariages de convenance’ leave their
enfeebling stamp on the offspring of them (King Lear). The marriage of near relations, or
the marrying in and in of the same family tends constantly to weakness or idiocy in the
children, sometimes assuming the form as they grow older of passionate licentiousness.
The common prostitute rarely has any offspring. By such unmistakable evidence is the
authority of morality asserted in the relations of the sexes: and so many more elements
enter into this ‘mystery’ than are dreamed of by Plato and some other philosophers.
Recent enquirers have indeed arrived at the conclusion that among primitive tribes
there existed a community of wives as of property, and that the captive taken by the
spear was the only wife or slave whom any man was permitted to call his own. The
partial existence of such customs among some of the lower races of man, and the
survival of peculiar ceremonies in the marriages of some civilized nations, are thought to
furnish a proof of similar institutions having been once universal. There can be no
question that the study of anthropology has considerably changed our views respecting
the first appearance of man upon the earth. We know more about the aborigines of the
world than formerly, but our increasing knowledge shows above all things how little we
know. With all the helps which written monuments afford, we do but faintly realize the
condition of man two thousand or three thousand years ago. Of what his condition was
when removed to a distance 200,000 or 300,000 years, when the majority of mankind
were lower and nearer the animals than any tribe now existing upon the earth, we
cannot even entertain conjecture. Plato (Laws) and Aristotle (Metaph.) may have been
more right than we imagine in supposing that some forms of civilisation were
discovered and lost several times over. If we cannot argue that all barbarism is a
degraded civilization, neither can we set any limits to the depth of degradation to which
the human race may sink through war, disease, or isolation. And if we are to draw
inferences about the origin of marriage from the practice of barbarous nations, we
should also consider the remoter analogy of the animals. Many birds and animals,
especially the carnivorous, have only one mate, and the love and care of offspring which
seems to be natural is inconsistent with the primitive theory of marriage. If we go back
to an imaginary state in which men were almost animals and the companions of them,
we have as much right to argue from what is animal to what is human as from the
barbarous to the civilized man. The record of animal life on the globe is fragmentary,—
the connecting links are wanting and cannot be supplied; the record of social life is still
more fragmentary and precarious. Even if we admit that our first ancestors had no such
institution as marriage, still the stages by which men passed from outer barbarism to the
comparative civilization of China, Assyria, and Greece, or even of the ancient Germans,
are wholly unknown to us.
Such speculations are apt to be unsettling, because they seem to show that an
institution which was thought to be a revelation from heaven, is only the growth of
history and experience. We ask what is the origin of marriage, and we are told that like
the right of property, after many wars and contests, it has gradually arisen out of the
selfishness of barbarians. We stand face to face with human nature in its primitive
nakedness. We are compelled to accept, not the highest, but the lowest account of the
origin of human society. But on the other hand we may truly say that every step in
human progress has been in the same direction, and that in the course of ages the idea
of marriage and of the family has been more and more defined and consecrated. The
civilized East is immeasurably in advance of any savage tribes; the Greeks and Romans
have improved upon the East; the Christian nations have been stricter in their views of
the marriage relation than any of the ancients. In this as in so many other things, instead
of looking back with regret to the past, we should look forward with hope to the future.
We must consecrate that which we believe to be the most holy, and that ‘which is the
most holy will be the most useful.’ There is more reason for maintaining the sacredness
of the marriage tie, when we see the benefit of it, than when we only felt a vague
religious horror about the violation of it. But in all times of transition, when established
beliefs are being undermined, there is a danger that in the passage from the old to the
new we may insensibly let go the moral principle, finding an excuse for listening to the
voice of passion in the uncertainty of knowledge, or the fluctuations of opinion. And
there are many persons in our own day who, enlightened by the study of anthropology,
and fascinated by what is new and strange, some using the language of fear, others of
hope, are inclined to believe that a time will come when through the self-assertion of
women, or the rebellious spirit of children, by the analysis of human relations, or by the
force of outward circumstances, the ties of family life may be broken or greatly relaxed.
They point to societies in America and elsewhere which tend to show that the
destruction of the family need not necessarily involve the overthrow of all morality.
Wherever we may think of such speculations, we can hardly deny that they have been
more rife in this generation than in any other; and whither they are tending, who can
predict?
To the doubts and queries raised by these ‘social reformers’ respecting the relation of
the sexes and the moral nature of man, there is a sufficient answer, if any is needed. The
difference about them and us is really one of fact. They are speaking of man as they
wish or fancy him to be, but we are speaking of him as he is. They isolate the animal part
of his nature; we regard him as a creature having many sides, or aspects, moving
between good and evil, striving to rise above himself and to become ‘a little lower than
the angels.’ We also, to use a Platonic formula, are not ignorant of the dissatisfactions
and incompatibilities of family life, of the meannesses of trade, of the flatteries of one
class of society by another, of the impediments which the family throws in the way of
lofty aims and aspirations. But we are conscious that there are evils and dangers in the
background greater still, which are not appreciated, because they are either concealed
or suppressed. What a condition of man would that be, in which human passions were
controlled by no authority, divine or human, in which there was no shame or decency,
no higher affection overcoming or sanctifying the natural instincts, but simply a rule of
health! Is it for this that we are asked to throw away the civilization which is the growth
of ages?
For strength and health are not the only qualities to be desired; there are the more
important considerations of mind and character and soul. We know how human nature
may be degraded; we do not know how by artificial means any improvement in the
breed can be effected. The problem is a complex one, for if we go back only four steps
(and these at least enter into the composition of a child), there are commonly thirty
progenitors to be taken into account. Many curious facts, rarely admitting of proof, are
told us respecting the inheritance of disease or character from a remote ancestor. We
can trace the physical resemblances of parents and children in the same family—
‘Sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat’;
but scarcely less often the differences which distinguish children both from their parents
and from one another. We are told of similar mental peculiarities running in families,
and again of a tendency, as in the animals, to revert to a common or original stock. But
we have a difficulty in distinguishing what is a true inheritance of genius or other
qualities, and what is mere imitation or the result of similar circumstances. Great men
and great women have rarely had great fathers and mothers. Nothing that we know of
in the circumstances of their birth or lineage will explain their appearance. Of the English
poets of the last and two preceding centuries scarcely a descendant remains,—none
have ever been distinguished. So deeply has nature hidden her secret, and so ridiculous
is the fancy which has been entertained by some that we might in time by suitable
marriage arrangements or, as Plato would have said, ‘by an ingenious system of lots,’
produce a Shakespeare or a Milton. Even supposing that we could breed men having
the tenacity of bulldogs, or, like the Spartans, ‘lacking the wit to run away in battle,’
would the world be any the better? Many of the noblest specimens of the human race
have been among the weakest physically. Tyrtaeus or Aesop, or our own Newton, would
have been exposed at Sparta; and some of the fairest and strongest men and women
have been among the wickedest and worst. Not by the Platonic device of uniting the
strong and fair with the strong and fair, regardless of sentiment and morality, nor yet by
his other device of combining dissimilar natures (Statesman), have mankind gradually
passed from the brutality and licentiousness of primitive marriage to marriage Christian
and civilized.
Few persons would deny that we bring into the world an inheritance of mental and
physical qualities derived first from our parents, or through them from some remoter
ancestor, secondly from our race, thirdly from the general condition of mankind into
which we are born. Nothing is commoner than the remark, that ‘So and so is like his
father or his uncle’; and an aged person may not unfrequently note a resemblance in a
youth to a long-forgotten ancestor, observing that ‘Nature sometimes skips a
generation.’ It may be true also, that if we knew more about our ancestors, these
similarities would be even more striking to us. Admitting the facts which are thus
described in a popular way, we may however remark that there is no method of
difference by which they can be defined or estimated, and that they constitute only a
small part of each individual. The doctrine of heredity may seem to take out of our
hands the conduct of our own lives, but it is the idea, not the fact, which is really terrible
to us. For what we have received from our ancestors is only a fraction of what we are, or
may become. The knowledge that drunkenness or insanity has been prevalent in a
family may be the best safeguard against their recurrence in a future generation. The
parent will be most awake to the vices or diseases in his child of which he is most
sensible within himself. The whole of life may be directed to their prevention or cure.
The traces of consumption may become fainter, or be wholly effaced: the inherent
tendency to vice or crime may be eradicated. And so heredity, from being a curse, may
become a blessing. We acknowledge that in the matter of our birth, as in our nature
generally, there are previous circumstances which affect us. But upon this platform of
circumstances or within this wall of necessity, we have still the power of creating a life
for ourselves by the informing energy of the human will.
There is another aspect of the marriage question to which Plato is a stranger. All the
children born in his state are foundlings. It never occurred to him that the greater part
of them, according to universal experience, would have perished. For children can only
be brought up in families. There is a subtle sympathy between the mother and the child
which cannot be supplied by other mothers, or by ‘strong nurses one or more’ (Laws). If
Plato’s ‘pen’ was as fatal as the Creches of Paris, or the foundling hospital of Dublin,
more than nine-tenths of his children would have perished. There would have been no
need to expose or put out of the way the weaklier children, for they would have died of
themselves. So emphatically does nature protest against the destruction of the family.
What Plato had heard or seen of Sparta was applied by him in a mistaken way to his
ideal commonwealth. He probably observed that both the Spartan men and women
were superior in form and strength to the other Greeks; and this superiority he was
disposed to attribute to the laws and customs relating to marriage. He did not consider
that the desire of a noble offspring was a passion among the Spartans, or that their
physical superiority was to be attributed chiefly, not to their marriage customs, but to
their temperance and training. He did not reflect that Sparta was great, not in
consequence of the relaxation of morality, but in spite of it, by virtue of a political
principle stronger far than existed in any other Grecian state. Least of all did he observe
that Sparta did not really produce the finest specimens of the Greek race. The genius,
the political inspiration of Athens, the love of liberty—all that has made Greece famous
with posterity, were wanting among the Spartans. They had no Themistocles, or Pericles,
or Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Socrates, or Plato. The individual was not allowed to
appear above the state; the laws were fixed, and he had no business to alter or reform
them. Yet whence has the progress of cities and nations arisen, if not from remarkable
individuals, coming into the world we know not how, and from causes over which we
have no control? Something too much may have been said in modern times of the value
of individuality. But we can hardly condemn too strongly a system which, instead of
fostering the scattered seeds or sparks of genius and character, tends to smother and
extinguish them.
Still, while condemning Plato, we must acknowledge that neither Christianity, nor any
other form of religion and society, has hitherto been able to cope with this most difficult
of social problems, and that the side from which Plato regarded it is that from which we
turn away. Population is the most untameable force in the political and social world. Do
we not find, especially in large cities, that the greatest hindrance to the amelioration of
the poor is their improvidence in marriage?—a small fault truly, if not involving endless
consequences. There are whole countries too, such as India, or, nearer home, Ireland, in
which a right solution of the marriage question seems to lie at the foundation of the
happiness of the community. There are too many people on a given space, or they
marry too early and bring into the world a sickly and half-developed offspring; or owing
to the very conditions of their existence, they become emaciated and hand on a similar
life to their descendants. But who can oppose the voice of prudence to the ‘mightiest
passions of mankind’ (Laws), especially when they have been licensed by custom and
religion? In addition to the influences of education, we seem to require some new
principles of right and wrong in these matters, some force of opinion, which may indeed
be already heard whispering in private, but has never affected the moral sentiments of
mankind in general. We unavoidably lose sight of the principle of utility, just in that
action of our lives in which we have the most need of it. The influences which we can
bring to bear upon this question are chiefly indirect. In a generation or two, education,
emigration, improvements in agriculture and manufactures, may have provided the
solution. The state physician hardly likes to probe the wound: it is beyond his art; a
matter which he cannot safely let alone, but which he dare not touch:
‘We do but skin and film the ulcerous place.’
When again in private life we see a whole family one by one dropping into the grave
under the Ate of some inherited malady, and the parents perhaps surviving them, do
our minds ever go back silently to that day twenty-five or thirty years before on which
under the fairest auspices, amid the rejoicings of friends and acquaintances, a bride and
bridegroom joined hands with one another? In making such a reflection we are not
opposing physical considerations to moral, but moral to physical; we are seeking to
make the voice of reason heard, which drives us back from the extravagance of
sentimentalism on common sense. The late Dr. Combe is said by his biographer to have
resisted the temptation to marriage, because he knew that he was subject to hereditary
consumption. One who deserved to be called a man of genius, a friend of my youth, was
in the habit of wearing a black ribbon on his wrist, in order to remind him that, being
liable to outbreaks of insanity, he must not give way to the natural impulses of affection:
he died unmarried in a lunatic asylum. These two little facts suggest the reflection that a
very few persons have done from a sense of duty what the rest of mankind ought to
have done under like circumstances, if they had allowed themselves to think of all the
misery which they were about to bring into the world. If we could prevent such
marriages without any violation of feeling or propriety, we clearly ought; and the
prohibition in the course of time would be protected by a ‘horror naturalis’ similar to
that which, in all civilized ages and countries, has prevented the marriage of near
relations by blood. Mankind would have been the happier, if some things which are now
allowed had from the beginning been denied to them; if the sanction of religion could
have prohibited practices inimical to health; if sanitary principles could in early ages
have been invested with a superstitious awe. But, living as we do far on in the world’s
history, we are no longer able to stamp at once with the impress of religion a new
prohibition. A free agent cannot have his fancies regulated by law; and the execution of
the law would be rendered impossible, owing to the uncertainty of the cases in which
marriage was to be forbidden. Who can weigh virtue, or even fortune against health, or
moral and mental qualities against bodily? Who can measure probabilities against
certainties? There has been some good as well as evil in the discipline of suffering; and
there are diseases, such as consumption, which have exercised a refining and softening
influence on the character. Youth is too inexperienced to balance such nice
considerations; parents do not often think of them, or think of them too late. They are at
a distance and may probably be averted; change of place, a new state of life, the
interests of a home may be the cure of them. So persons vainly reason when their minds
are already made up and their fortunes irrevocably linked together. Nor is there any
ground for supposing that marriages are to any great extent influenced by reflections of
this sort, which seem unable to make any head against the irresistible impulse of
individual attachment.
Lastly, no one can have observed the first rising flood of the passions in youth, the
difficulty of regulating them, and the effects on the whole mind and nature which follow
from them, the stimulus which is given to them by the imagination, without feeling that
there is something unsatisfactory in our method of treating them. That the most
important influence on human life should be wholly left to chance or shrouded in
mystery, and instead of being disciplined or understood, should be required to conform
only to an external standard of propriety—cannot be regarded by the philosopher as a
safe or satisfactory condition of human things. And still those who have the charge of
youth may find a way by watchfulness, by affection, by the manliness and innocence of
their own lives, by occasional hints, by general admonitions which every one can apply
for himself, to mitigate this terrible evil which eats out the heart of individuals and
corrupts the moral sentiments of nations. In no duty towards others is there more need
of reticence and self-restraint. So great is the danger lest he who would be the
counsellor of another should reveal the secret prematurely, lest he should get another
too much into his power; or fix the passing impression of evil by demanding the
confession of it.
Nor is Plato wrong in asserting that family attachments may interfere with higher aims. If
there have been some who ‘to party gave up what was meant for mankind,’ there have
certainly been others who to family gave up what was meant for mankind or for their
country. The cares of children, the necessity of procuring money for their support, the
flatteries of the rich by the poor, the exclusiveness of caste, the pride of birth or wealth,
the tendency of family life to divert men from the pursuit of the ideal or the heroic, are
as lowering in our own age as in that of Plato. And if we prefer to look at the gentle
influences of home, the development of the affections, the amenities of society, the
devotion of one member of a family for the good of the others, which form one side of
the picture, we must not quarrel with him, or perhaps ought rather to be grateful to him,
for having presented to us the reverse. Without attempting to defend Plato on grounds
of morality, we may allow that there is an aspect of the world which has not unnaturally
led him into error.
We hardly appreciate the power which the idea of the State, like all other abstract ideas,
exercised over the mind of Plato. To us the State seems to be built up out of the family,
or sometimes to be the framework in which family and social life is contained. But to
Plato in his present mood of mind the family is only a disturbing influence which,
instead of filling up, tends to disarrange the higher unity of the State. No organization is
needed except a political, which, regarded from another point of view, is a military one.
The State is all-sufficing for the wants of man, and, like the idea of the Church in later
ages, absorbs all other desires and affections. In time of war the thousand citizens are to
stand like a rampart impregnable against the world or the Persian host; in time of peace
the preparation for war and their duties to the State, which are also their duties to one
another, take up their whole life and time. The only other interest which is allowed to
them besides that of war, is the interest of philosophy. When they are too old to be
soldiers they are to retire from active life and to have a second novitiate of study and
contemplation. There is an element of monasticism even in Plato’s communism. If he
could have done without children, he might have converted his Republic into a religious
order. Neither in the Laws, when the daylight of common sense breaks in upon him,
does he retract his error. In the state of which he would be the founder, there is no
marrying or giving in marriage: but because of the infirmity of mankind, he condescends
to allow the law of nature to prevail.
(c) But Plato has an equal, or, in his own estimation, even greater paradox in reserve,
which is summed up in the famous text, ‘Until kings are philosophers or philosophers
are kings, cities will never cease from ill.’ And by philosophers he explains himself to
mean those who are capable of apprehending ideas, especially the idea of good. To the
attainment of this higher knowledge the second education is directed. Through a
process of training which has already made them good citizens they are now to be
made good legislators. We find with some surprise (not unlike the feeling which
Aristotle in a well-known passage describes the hearers of Plato’s lectures as
experiencing, when they went to a discourse on the idea of good, expecting to be
instructed in moral truths, and received instead of them arithmetical and mathematical
formulae) that Plato does not propose for his future legislators any study of finance or
law or military tactics, but only of abstract mathematics, as a preparation for the still
more abstract conception of good. We ask, with Aristotle, What is the use of a man
knowing the idea of good, if he does not know what is good for this individual, this
state, this condition of society? We cannot understand how Plato’s legislators or
guardians are to be fitted for their work of statesmen by the study of the five
mathematical sciences. We vainly search in Plato’s own writings for any explanation of
this seeming absurdity.
The discovery of a great metaphysical conception seems to ravish the mind with a
prophetic consciousness which takes away the power of estimating its value. No
metaphysical enquirer has ever fairly criticised his own speculations; in his own
judgment they have been above criticism; nor has he understood that what to him
seemed to be absolute truth may reappear in the next generation as a form of logic or
an instrument of thought. And posterity have also sometimes equally misapprehended
the real value of his speculations. They appear to them to have contributed nothing to
the stock of human knowledge. The IDEA of good is apt to be regarded by the modern
thinker as an unmeaning abstraction; but he forgets that this abstraction is waiting
ready for use, and will hereafter be filled up by the divisions of knowledge. When
mankind do not as yet know that the world is subject to law, the introduction of the
mere conception of law or design or final cause, and the far-off anticipation of the
harmony of knowledge, are great steps onward. Even the crude generalization of the
unity of all things leads men to view the world with different eyes, and may easily affect
their conception of human life and of politics, and also their own conduct and character
(Tim). We can imagine how a great mind like that of Pericles might derive elevation from
his intercourse with Anaxagoras (Phaedr.). To be struggling towards a higher but
unattainable conception is a more favourable intellectual condition than to rest satisfied
in a narrow portion of ascertained fact. And the earlier, which have sometimes been the
greater ideas of science, are often lost sight of at a later period. How rarely can we say
of any modern enquirer in the magnificent language of Plato, that ‘He is the spectator of
all time and of all existence!’
Nor is there anything unnatural in the hasty application of these vast metaphysical
conceptions to practical and political life. In the first enthusiasm of ideas men are apt to
see them everywhere, and to apply them in the most remote sphere. They do not
understand that the experience of ages is required to enable them to fill up ‘the
intermediate axioms.’ Plato himself seems to have imagined that the truths of
psychology, like those of astronomy and harmonics, would be arrived at by a process of
deduction, and that the method which he has pursued in the Fourth Book, of inferring
them from experience and the use of language, was imperfect and only provisional. But
when, after having arrived at the idea of good, which is the end of the science of
dialectic, he is asked, What is the nature, and what are the divisions of the science? He
refuses to answer, as if intending by the refusal to intimate that the state of knowledge
which then existed was not such as would allow the philosopher to enter into his final
rest. The previous sciences must first be studied, and will, we may add, continue to be
studied tell the end of time, although in a sense different from any which Plato could
have conceived. But we may observe, that while he is aware of the vacancy of his own
ideal, he is full of enthusiasm in the contemplation of it. Looking into the orb of light, he
sees nothing, but he is warmed and elevated. The Hebrew prophet believed that faith in
God would enable him to govern the world; the Greek philosopher imagined that
contemplation of the good would make a legislator. There is as much to be filled up in
the one case as in the other, and the one mode of conception is to the Israelite what the
other is to the Greek. Both find a repose in a divine perfection, which, whether in a more
personal or impersonal form, exists without them and independently of them, as well as
within them.
There is no mention of the idea of good in the Timaeus, nor of the divine Creator of the
world in the Republic; and we are naturally led to ask in what relation they stand to one
another. Is God above or below the idea of good? Or is the Idea of Good another mode
of conceiving God? The latter appears to be the truer answer. To the Greek philosopher
the perfection and unity of God was a far higher conception than his personality, which
he hardly found a word to express, and which to him would have seemed to be
borrowed from mythology. To the Christian, on the other hand, or to the modern
thinker in general, it is difficult, if not impossible, to attach reality to what he terms mere
abstraction; while to Plato this very abstraction is the truest and most real of all things.
Hence, from a difference in forms of thought, Plato appears to be resting on a creation
of his own mind only. But if we may be allowed to paraphrase the idea of good by the
words ‘intelligent principle of law and order in the universe, embracing equally man and
nature,’ we begin to find a meeting-point between him and ourselves.
The question whether the ruler or statesman should be a philosopher is one that has not
lost interest in modern times. In most countries of Europe and Asia there has been some
one in the course of ages who has truly united the power of command with the power
of thought and reflection, as there have been also many false combinations of these
qualities. Some kind of speculative power is necessary both in practical and political life;
like the rhetorician in the Phaedrus, men require to have a conception of the varieties of
human character, and to be raised on great occasions above the commonplaces of
ordinary life. Yet the idea of the philosopher-statesman has never been popular with the
mass of mankind; partly because he cannot take the world into his confidence or make
them understand the motives from which he acts; and also because they are jealous of a
power which they do not understand. The revolution which human nature desires to
effect step by step in many ages is likely to be precipitated by him in a single year or life.
They are afraid that in the pursuit of his greater aims he may disregard the common
feelings of humanity, he is too apt to be looking into the distant future or back into the
remote past, and unable to see actions or events which, to use an expression of Plato’s
‘are tumbling out at his feet.’ Besides, as Plato would say, there are other corruptions of
these philosophical statesmen. Either ‘the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with
the pale cast of thought,’ and at the moment when action above all things is required he
is undecided, or general principles are enunciated by him in order to cover some change
of policy; or his ignorance of the world has made him more easily fall a prey to the arts
of others; or in some cases he has been converted into a courtier, who enjoys the luxury
of holding liberal opinions, but was never known to perform a liberal action. No wonder
that mankind have been in the habit of calling statesmen of this class pedants,
sophisters, doctrinaires, visionaries. For, as we may be allowed to say, a little parodying
the words of Plato, ‘they have seen bad imitations of the philosopher-statesman.’ But a
man in whom the power of thought and action are perfectly balanced, equal to the
present, reaching forward to the future, ‘such a one,’ ruling in a constitutional state,
‘they have never seen.’
But as the philosopher is apt to fail in the routine of political life, so the ordinary
statesman is also apt to fail in extraordinary crises. When the face of the world is
beginning to alter, and thunder is heard in the distance, he is still guided by his old
maxims, and is the slave of his inveterate party prejudices; he cannot perceive the signs
of the times; instead of looking forward he looks back; he learns nothing and forgets
nothing; with ‘wise saws and modern instances’ he would stem the rising tide of
revolution. He lives more and more within the circle of his own party, as the world
without him becomes stronger. This seems to be the reason why the old order of things
makes so poor a figure when confronted with the new, why churches can never reform,
why most political changes are made blindly and convulsively. The great crises in the
history of nations have often been met by an ecclesiastical positiveness, and a more
obstinate reassertion of principles which have lost their hold upon a nation. The fixed
ideas of a reactionary statesman may be compared to madness; they grow upon him,
and he becomes possessed by them; no judgement of others is ever admitted by him to
be weighed in the balance against his own.
(d) Plato, labouring under what, to modern readers, appears to have been a confusion of
ideas, assimilates the state to the individual, and fails to distinguish Ethics from Politics.
He thinks that to be most of a state which is most like one man, and in which the
citizens have the greatest uniformity of character. He does not see that the analogy is
partly fallacious, and that the will or character of a state or nation is really the balance or
rather the surplus of individual wills, which are limited by the condition of having to act
in common. The movement of a body of men can never have the pliancy or facility of a
single man; the freedom of the individual, which is always limited, becomes still more
straitened when transferred to a nation. The powers of action and feeling are necessarily
weaker and more balanced when they are diffused through a community; whence arises
the often discussed question, ‘Can a nation, like an individual, have a conscience?’ We
hesitate to say that the characters of nations are nothing more than the sum of the
characters of the individuals who compose them; because there may be tendencies in
individuals which react upon one another. A whole nation may be wiser than any one
man in it; or may be animated by some common opinion or feeling which could not
equally have affected the mind of a single person, or may have been inspired by a
leader of genius to perform acts more than human. Plato does not appear to have
analysed the complications which arise out of the collective action of mankind. Neither
is he capable of seeing that analogies, though specious as arguments, may often have
no foundation in fact, or of distinguishing between what is intelligible or vividly present
to the mind, and what is true. In this respect he is far below Aristotle, who is
comparatively seldom imposed upon by false analogies. He cannot disentangle the arts
from the virtues—at least he is always arguing from one to the other. His notion of
music is transferred from harmony of sounds to harmony of life: in this he is assisted by
the ambiguities of language as well as by the prevalence of Pythagorean notions. And
having once assimilated the state to the individual, he imagines that he will find the
succession of states paralleled in the lives of individuals.
Still, through this fallacious medium, a real enlargement of ideas is attained. When the
virtues as yet presented no distinct conception to the mind, a great advance was made
by the comparison of them with the arts; for virtue is partly art, and has an outward form
as well as an inward principle. The harmony of music affords a lively image of the
harmonies of the world and of human life, and may be regarded as a splendid
illustration which was naturally mistaken for a real analogy. In the same way the
identification of ethics with politics has a tendency to give definiteness to ethics, and
also to elevate and ennoble men’s notions of the aims of government and of the duties
of citizens; for ethics from one point of view may be conceived as an idealized law and
politics; and politics, as ethics reduced to the conditions of human society. There have
been evils which have arisen out of the attempt to identify them, and this has led to the
separation or antagonism of them, which has been introduced by modern political
writers. But we may likewise feel that something has been lost in their separation, and
that the ancient philosophers who estimated the moral and intellectual wellbeing of
mankind first, and the wealth of nations and individuals second, may have a salutary
influence on the speculations of modern times. Many political maxims originate in a
reaction against an opposite error; and when the errors against which they were
directed have passed away, they in turn become errors.
3. Plato’s views of education are in several respects remarkable; like the rest of the
Republic they are partly Greek and partly ideal, beginning with the ordinary curriculum
of the Greek youth, and extending to after-life. Plato is the first writer who distinctly says
that education is to comprehend the whole of life, and to be a preparation for another
in which education begins again. This is the continuous thread which runs through the
Republic, and which more than any other of his ideas admits of an application to
modern life.
He has long given up the notion that virtue cannot be taught; and he is disposed to
modify the thesis of the Protagoras, that the virtues are one and not many. He is not
unwilling to admit the sensible world into his scheme of truth. Nor does he assert in the
Republic the involuntariness of vice, which is maintained by him in the Timaeus, Sophist,
and Laws (Protag., Apol., Gorg.). Nor do the so-called Platonic ideas recovered from a
former state of existence affect his theory of mental improvement. Still we observe in
him the remains of the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge must be elicited from
within, and is to be sought for in ideas, not in particulars of sense. Education, as he says,
will implant a principle of intelligence which is better than ten thousand eyes. The
paradox that the virtues are one, and the kindred notion that all virtue is knowledge, are
not entirely renounced; the first is seen in the supremacy given to justice over the rest;
the second in the tendency to absorb the moral virtues in the intellectual, and to centre
all goodness in the contemplation of the idea of good. The world of sense is still
depreciated and identified with opinion, though admitted to be a shadow of the true. In
the Republic he is evidently impressed with the conviction that vice arises chiefly from
ignorance and may be cured by education; the multitude are hardly to be deemed
responsible for what they do. A faint allusion to the doctrine of reminiscence occurs in
the Tenth Book; but Plato’s views of education have no more real connection with a
previous state of existence than our own; he only proposes to elicit from the mind that
which is there already. Education is represented by him, not as the filling of a vessel, but
as the turning the eye of the soul towards the light.
He treats first of music or literature, which he divides into true and false, and then goes
on to gymnastics; of infancy in the Republic he takes no notice, though in the Laws he
gives sage counsels about the nursing of children and the management of the mothers,
and would have an education which is even prior to birth. But in the Republic he begins
with the age at which the child is capable of receiving ideas, and boldly asserts, in
language which sounds paradoxical to modern ears, that he must be taught the false
before he can learn the true. The modern and ancient philosophical world are not
agreed about truth and falsehood; the one identifies truth almost exclusively with fact,
the other with ideas. This is the difference between ourselves and Plato, which is,
however, partly a difference of words. For we too should admit that a child must receive
many lessons which he imperfectly understands; he must be taught some things in a
figure only, some too which he can hardly be expected to believe when he grows older;
but we should limit the use of fiction by the necessity of the case. Plato would draw the
line differently; according to him the aim of early education is not truth as a matter of
fact, but truth as a matter of principle; the child is to be taught first simple religious
truths, and then simple moral truths, and insensibly to learn the lesson of good manners
and good taste. He would make an entire reformation of the old mythology; like
Xenophanes and Heracleitus he is sensible of the deep chasm which separates his own
age from Homer and Hesiod, whom he quotes and invests with an imaginary authority,
but only for his own purposes. The lusts and treacheries of the gods are to be banished;
the terrors of the world below are to be dispelled; the misbehaviour of the Homeric
heroes is not to be a model for youth. But there is another strain heard in Homer which
may teach our youth endurance; and something may be learnt in medicine from the
simple practice of the Homeric age. The principles on which religion is to be based are
two only: first, that God is true; secondly, that he is good. Modern and Christian writers
have often fallen short of these; they can hardly be said to have gone beyond them.
The young are to be brought up in happy surroundings, out of the way of sights or
sounds which may hurt the character or vitiate the taste. They are to live in an
atmosphere of health; the breeze is always to be wafting to them the impressions of
truth and goodness. Could such an education be realized, or if our modern religious
education could be bound up with truth and virtue and good manners and good taste,
that would be the best hope of human improvement. Plato, like ourselves, is looking
forward to changes in the moral and religious world, and is preparing for them. He
recognizes the danger of unsettling young men’s minds by sudden changes of laws and
principles, by destroying the sacredness of one set of ideas when there is nothing else
to take their place. He is afraid too of the influence of the drama, on the ground that it
encourages false sentiment, and therefore he would not have his children taken to the
theatre; he thinks that the effect on the spectators is bad, and on the actors still worse.
His idea of education is that of harmonious growth, in which are insensibly learnt the
lessons of temperance and endurance, and the body and mind develope in equal
proportions. The first principle which runs through all art and nature is simplicity; this
also is to be the rule of human life.
The second stage of education is gymnastic, which answers to the period of muscular
growth and development. The simplicity which is enforced in music is extended to
gymnastic; Plato is aware that the training of the body may be inconsistent with the
training of the mind, and that bodily exercise may be easily overdone. Excessive training
of the body is apt to give men a headache or to render them sleepy at a lecture on
philosophy, and this they attribute not to the true cause, but to the nature of the
subject. Two points are noticeable in Plato’s treatment of gymnastic:—First, that the
time of training is entirely separated from the time of literary education. He seems to
have thought that two things of an opposite and different nature could not be learnt at
the same time. Here we can hardly agree with him; and, if we may judge by experience,
the effect of spending three years between the ages of fourteen and seventeen in mere
bodily exercise would be far from improving to the intellect. Secondly, he affirms that
music and gymnastic are not, as common opinion is apt to imagine, intended, the one
for the cultivation of the mind and the other of the body, but that they are both equally
designed for the improvement of the mind. The body, in his view, is the servant of the
mind; the subjection of the lower to the higher is for the advantage of both. And
doubtless the mind may exercise a very great and paramount influence over the body, if
exerted not at particular moments and by fits and starts, but continuously, in making
preparation for the whole of life. Other Greek writers saw the mischievous tendency of
Spartan discipline (Arist. Pol; Thuc.). But only Plato recognized the fundamental error on
which the practice was based.
The subject of gymnastic leads Plato to the sister subject of medicine, which he further
illustrates by the parallel of law. The modern disbelief in medicine has led in this, as in
some other departments of knowledge, to a demand for greater simplicity; physicians
are becoming aware that they often make diseases ‘greater and more complicated’ by
their treatment of them (Rep.). In two thousand years their art has made but slender
progress; what they have gained in the analysis of the parts is in a great degree lost by
their feebler conception of the human frame as a whole. They have attended more to
the cure of diseases than to the conditions of health; and the improvements in medicine
have been more than counterbalanced by the disuse of regular training. Until lately they
have hardly thought of air and water, the importance of which was well understood by
the ancients; as Aristotle remarks, ‘Air and water, being the elements which we most use,
have the greatest effect upon health’ (Polit.). For ages physicians have been under the
dominion of prejudices which have only recently given way; and now there are as many
opinions in medicine as in theology, and an equal degree of scepticism and some want
of toleration about both. Plato has several good notions about medicine; according to
him, ‘the eye cannot be cured without the rest of the body, nor the body without the
mind’ (Charm.). No man of sense, he says in the Timaeus, would take physic; and we
heartily sympathize with him in the Laws when he declares that ‘the limbs of the rustic
worn with toil will derive more benefit from warm baths than from the prescriptions of a
not over wise doctor.’ But we can hardly praise him when, in obedience to the authority
of Homer, he depreciates diet, or approve of the inhuman spirit in which he would get
rid of invalid and useless lives by leaving them to die. He does not seem to have
considered that the ‘bridle of Theages’ might be accompanied by qualities which were
of far more value to the State than the health or strength of the citizens; or that the duty
of taking care of the helpless might be an important element of education in a State.
The physician himself (this is a delicate and subtle observation) should not be a man in
robust health; he should have, in modern phraseology, a nervous temperament; he
should have experience of disease in his own person, in order that his powers of
observation may be quickened in the case of others.
The perplexity of medicine is paralleled by the perplexity of law; in which, again, Plato
would have men follow the golden rule of simplicity. Greater matters are to be
determined by the legislator or by the oracle of Delphi, lesser matters are to be left to
the temporary regulation of the citizens themselves. Plato is aware that laissez faire is an
important element of government. The diseases of a State are like the heads of a hydra;
they multiply when they are cut off. The true remedy for them is not extirpation but
prevention. And the way to prevent them is to take care of education, and education will
take care of all the rest. So in modern times men have often felt that the only political
measure worth having—the only one which would produce any certain or lasting effect,
was a measure of national education. And in our own more than in any previous age the
necessity has been recognized of restoring the ever-increasing confusion of law to
simplicity and common sense.
When the training in music and gymnastic is completed, there follows the first stage of
active and public life. But soon education is to begin again from a new point of view. In
the interval between the Fourth and Seventh Books we have discussed the nature of
knowledge, and have thence been led to form a higher conception of what was required
of us. For true knowledge, according to Plato, is of abstractions, and has to do, not with
particulars or individuals, but with universals only; not with the beauties of poetry, but
with the ideas of philosophy. And the great aim of education is the cultivation of the
habit of abstraction. This is to be acquired through the study of the mathematical
sciences. They alone are capable of giving ideas of relation, and of arousing the dormant
energies of thought.
Mathematics in the age of Plato comprehended a very small part of that which is now
included in them; but they bore a much larger proportion to the sum of human
knowledge. They were the only organon of thought which the human mind at that time
possessed, and the only measure by which the chaos of particulars could be reduced to
rule and order. The faculty which they trained was naturally at war with the poetical or
imaginative; and hence to Plato, who is everywhere seeking for abstractions and trying
to get rid of the illusions of sense, nearly the whole of education is contained in them.
They seemed to have an inexhaustible application, partly because their true limits were
not yet understood. These Plato himself is beginning to investigate; though not aware
that number and figure are mere abstractions of sense, he recognizes that the forms
used by geometry are borrowed from the sensible world. He seeks to find the ultimate
ground of mathematical ideas in the idea of good, though he does not satisfactorily
explain the connexion between them; and in his conception of the relation of ideas to
numbers, he falls very far short of the definiteness attributed to him by Aristotle (Met.).
But if he fails to recognize the true limits of mathematics, he also reaches a point
beyond them; in his view, ideas of number become secondary to a higher conception of
knowledge. The dialectician is as much above the mathematician as the mathematician
is above the ordinary man. The one, the self-proving, the good which is the higher
sphere of dialectic, is the perfect truth to which all things ascend, and in which they
finally repose.
This self-proving unity or idea of good is a mere vision of which no distinct explanation
can be given, relative only to a particular stage in Greek philosophy. It is an abstraction
under which no individuals are comprehended, a whole which has no parts (Arist., Nic.
Eth.). The vacancy of such a form was perceived by Aristotle, but not by Plato. Nor did
he recognize that in the dialectical process are included two or more methods of
investigation which are at variance with each other. He did not see that whether he took
the longer or the shorter road, no advance could be made in this way. And yet such
visions often have an immense effect; for although the method of science cannot
anticipate science, the idea of science, not as it is, but as it will be in the future, is a great
and inspiring principle. In the pursuit of knowledge we are always pressing forward to
something beyond us; and as a false conception of knowledge, for example the
scholastic philosophy, may lead men astray during many ages, so the true ideal, though
vacant, may draw all their thoughts in a right direction. It makes a great difference
whether the general expectation of knowledge, as this indefinite feeling may be termed,
is based upon a sound judgment. For mankind may often entertain a true conception of
what knowledge ought to be when they have but a slender experience of facts. The
correlation of the sciences, the consciousness of the unity of nature, the idea of
classification, the sense of proportion, the unwillingness to stop short of certainty or to
confound probability with truth, are important principles of the higher education.
Although Plato could tell us nothing, and perhaps knew that he could tell us nothing, of
the absolute truth, he has exercised an influence on the human mind which even at the
present day is not exhausted; and political and social questions may yet arise in which
the thoughts of Plato may be read anew and receive a fresh meaning.
The Idea of good is so called only in the Republic, but there are traces of it in other
dialogues of Plato. It is a cause as well as an idea, and from this point of view may be
compared with the creator of the Timaeus, who out of his goodness created all things. It
corresponds to a certain extent with the modern conception of a law of nature, or of a
final cause, or of both in one, and in this regard may be connected with the measure
and symmetry of the Philebus. It is represented in the Symposium under the aspect of
beauty, and is supposed to be attained there by stages of initiation, as here by regular
gradations of knowledge. Viewed subjectively, it is the process or science of dialectic.
This is the science which, according to the Phaedrus, is the true basis of rhetoric, which
alone is able to distinguish the natures and classes of men and things; which divides a
whole into the natural parts, and reunites the scattered parts into a natural or organized
whole; which defines the abstract essences or universal ideas of all things, and connects
them; which pierces the veil of hypotheses and reaches the final cause or first principle
of all; which regards the sciences in relation to the idea of good. This ideal science is the
highest process of thought, and may be described as the soul conversing with herself or
holding communion with eternal truth and beauty, and in another form is the
everlasting question and answer—the ceaseless interrogative of Socrates. The dialogues
of Plato are themselves examples of the nature and method of dialectic. Viewed
objectively, the idea of good is a power or cause which makes the world without us
correspond with the world within. Yet this world without us is still a world of ideas. With
Plato the investigation of nature is another department of knowledge, and in this he
seeks to attain only probable conclusions (Timaeus).
If we ask whether this science of dialectic which Plato only half explains to us is more
akin to logic or to metaphysics, the answer is that in his mind the two sciences are not
as yet distinguished, any more than the subjective and objective aspects of the world
and of man, which German philosophy has revealed to us. Nor has he determined
whether his science of dialectic is at rest or in motion, concerned with the contemplation
of absolute being, or with a process of development and evolution. Modern
metaphysics may be described as the science of abstractions, or as the science of the
evolution of thought; modern logic, when passing beyond the bounds of mere
Aristotelian forms, may be defined as the science of method. The germ of both of them
is contained in the Platonic dialectic; all metaphysicians have something in common
with the ideas of Plato; all logicians have derived something from the method of Plato.
The nearest approach in modern philosophy to the universal science of Plato, is to be
found in the Hegelian ‘succession of moments in the unity of the idea.’ Plato and Hegel
alike seem to have conceived the world as the correlation of abstractions; and not
impossibly they would have understood one another better than any of their
commentators understand them (Swift’s Voyage to Laputa. ‘Having a desire to see those
ancients who were most renowned for wit and learning, I set apart one day on purpose.
I proposed that Homer and Aristotle might appear at the head of all their
commentators; but these were so numerous that some hundreds were forced to attend
in the court and outward rooms of the palace. I knew, and could distinguish these two
heroes, at first sight, not only from the crowd, but from each other. Homer was the taller
and comelier person of the two, walked very erect for one of his age, and his eyes were
the most quick and piercing I ever beheld. Aristotle stooped much, and made use of a
staff. His visage was meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow. I soon
discovered that both of them were perfect strangers to the rest of the company, and
had never seen or heard of them before. And I had a whisper from a ghost, who shall be
nameless, “That these commentators always kept in the most distant quarters from their
principals, in the lower world, through a consciousness of shame and guilt, because they
had so horribly misrepresented the meaning of these authors to posterity.” I introduced
Didymus and Eustathius to Homer, and prevailed on him to treat them better than
perhaps they deserved, for he soon found they wanted a genius to enter into the spirit
of a poet. But Aristotle was out of all patience with the account I gave him of Scotus and
Ramus, as I presented them to him; and he asked them “whether the rest of the tribe
were as great dunces as themselves?”’). There is, however, a difference between them:
for whereas Hegel is thinking of all the minds of men as one mind, which developes the
stages of the idea in different countries or at different times in the same country, with
Plato these gradations are regarded only as an order of thought or ideas; the history of
the human mind had not yet dawned upon him.
Many criticisms may be made on Plato’s theory of education. While in some respects he
unavoidably falls short of modern thinkers, in others he is in advance of them. He is
opposed to the modes of education which prevailed in his own time; but he can hardly
be said to have discovered new ones. He does not see that education is relative to the
characters of individuals; he only desires to impress the same form of the state on the
minds of all. He has no sufficient idea of the effect of literature on the formation of the
mind, and greatly exaggerates that of mathematics. His aim is above all things to train
the reasoning faculties; to implant in the mind the spirit and power of abstraction; to
explain and define general notions, and, if possible, to connect them. No wonder that in
the vacancy of actual knowledge his followers, and at times even he himself, should
have fallen away from the doctrine of ideas, and have returned to that branch of
knowledge in which alone the relation of the one and many can be truly seen—the
science of number. In his views both of teaching and training he might be styled, in
modern language, a doctrinaire; after the Spartan fashion he would have his citizens cast
in one mould; he does not seem to consider that some degree of freedom, ‘a little
wholesome neglect,’ is necessary to strengthen and develope the character and to give
play to the individual nature. His citizens would not have acquired that knowledge which
in the vision of Er is supposed to be gained by the pilgrims from their experience of evil.
On the other hand, Plato is far in advance of modern philosophers and theologians
when he teaches that education is to be continued through life and will begin again in
another. He would never allow education of some kind to cease; although he was aware
that the proverbial saying of Solon, ‘I grow old learning many things,’ cannot be applied
literally. Himself ravished with the contemplation of the idea of good, and delighting in
solid geometry (Rep.), he has no difficulty in imagining that a lifetime might be passed
happily in such pursuits. We who know how many more men of business there are in the
world than real students or thinkers, are not equally sanguine. The education which he
proposes for his citizens is really the ideal life of the philosopher or man of genius,
interrupted, but only for a time, by practical duties,—a life not for the many, but for the
few.
Yet the thought of Plato may not be wholly incapable of application to our own times.
Even if regarded as an ideal which can never be realized, it may have a great effect in
elevating the characters of mankind, and raising them above the routine of their
ordinary occupation or profession. It is the best form under which we can conceive the
whole of life. Nevertheless the idea of Plato is not easily put into practice. For the
education of after life is necessarily the education which each one gives himself. Men
and women cannot be brought together in schools or colleges at forty or fifty years of
age; and if they could the result would be disappointing. The destination of most men is
what Plato would call ‘the Den’ for the whole of life, and with that they are content.
Neither have they teachers or advisers with whom they can take counsel in riper years.
There is no ‘schoolmaster abroad’ who will tell them of their faults, or inspire them with
the higher sense of duty, or with the ambition of a true success in life; no Socrates who
will convict them of ignorance; no Christ, or follower of Christ, who will reprove them of
sin. Hence they have a difficulty in receiving the first element of improvement, which is
self-knowledge. The hopes of youth no longer stir them; they rather wish to rest than to
pursue high objects. A few only who have come across great men and women, or
eminent teachers of religion and morality, have received a second life from them, and
have lighted a candle from the fire of their genius.
The want of energy is one of the main reasons why so few persons continue to improve
in later years. They have not the will, and do not know the way. They ‘never try an
experiment,’ or look up a point of interest for themselves; they make no sacrifices for
the sake of knowledge; their minds, like their bodies, at a certain age become fixed.
Genius has been defined as ‘the power of taking pains’; but hardly any one keeps up his
interest in knowledge throughout a whole life. The troubles of a family, the business of
making money, the demands of a profession destroy the elasticity of the mind. The
waxen tablet of the memory which was once capable of receiving ‘true thoughts and
clear impressions’ becomes hard and crowded; there is not room for the accumulations
of a long life (Theaet.). The student, as years advance, rather makes an exchange of
knowledge than adds to his stores. There is no pressing necessity to learn; the stock of
Classics or History or Natural Science which was enough for a man at twenty-five is
enough for him at fifty. Neither is it easy to give a definite answer to any one who asks
how he is to improve. For self-education consists in a thousand things, commonplace in
themselves,—in adding to what we are by nature something of what we are not; in
learning to see ourselves as others see us; in judging, not by opinion, but by the
evidence of facts; in seeking out the society of superior minds; in a study of lives and
writings of great men; in observation of the world and character; in receiving kindly the
natural influence of different times of life; in any act or thought which is raised above
the practice or opinions of mankind; in the pursuit of some new or original enquiry; in
any effort of mind which calls forth some latent power.
If any one is desirous of carrying out in detail the Platonic education of after-life, some
such counsels as the following may be offered to him:— That he shall choose the branch
of knowledge to which his own mind most distinctly inclines, and in which he takes the
greatest delight, either one which seems to connect with his own daily employment, or,
perhaps, furnishes the greatest contrast to it. He may study from the speculative side
the profession or business in which he is practically engaged. He may make Homer,
Dante, Shakespeare, Plato, Bacon the friends and companions of his life. He may find
opportunities of hearing the living voice of a great teacher. He may select for enquiry
some point of history or some unexplained phenomenon of nature. An hour a day
passed in such scientific or literary pursuits will furnish as many facts as the memory can
retain, and will give him ‘a pleasure not to be repented of’ (Timaeus). Only let him
beware of being the slave of crotchets, or of running after a Will o’ the Wisp in his
ignorance, or in his vanity of attributing to himself the gifts of a poet or assuming the air
of a philosopher. He should know the limits of his own powers. Better to build up the
mind by slow additions, to creep on quietly from one thing to another, to gain
insensibly new powers and new interests in knowledge, than to form vast schemes
which are never destined to be realized. But perhaps, as Plato would say, ‘This is part of
another subject’ (Tim.); though we may also defend our digression by his example
(Theaet.).
4. We remark with surprise that the progress of nations or the natural growth of
institutions which fill modern treatises on political philosophy seem hardly ever to have
attracted the attention of Plato and Aristotle. The ancients were familiar with the
mutability of human affairs; they could moralize over the ruins of cities and the fall of
empires (Plato, Statesman, and Sulpicius’ Letter to Cicero); by them fate and chance
were deemed to be real powers, almost persons, and to have had a great share in
political events. The wiser of them like Thucydides believed that ‘what had been would
be again,’ and that a tolerable idea of the future could be gathered from the past. Also
they had dreams of a Golden Age which existed once upon a time and might still exist in
some unknown land, or might return again in the remote future. But the regular growth
of a state enlightened by experience, progressing in knowledge, improving in the arts, of
which the citizens were educated by the fulfilment of political duties, appears never to
have come within the range of their hopes and aspirations. Such a state had never been
seen, and therefore could not be conceived by them. Their experience (Aristot. Metaph.;
Plato, Laws) led them to conclude that there had been cycles of civilization in which the
arts had been discovered and lost many times over, and cities had been overthrown and
rebuilt again and again, and deluges and volcanoes and other natural convulsions had
altered the face of the earth. Tradition told them of many destructions of mankind and
of the preservation of a remnant. The world began again after a deluge and was
reconstructed out of the fragments of itself. Also they were acquainted with empires of
unknown antiquity, like the Egyptian or Assyrian; but they had never seen them grow,
and could not imagine, any more than we can, the state of man which preceded them.
They were puzzled and awestricken by the Egyptian monuments, of which the forms, as
Plato says, not in a figure, but literally, were ten thousand years old (Laws), and they
contrasted the antiquity of Egypt with their own short memories.
The early legends of Hellas have no real connection with the later history: they are at a
distance, and the intermediate region is concealed from view; there is no road or path
which leads from one to the other. At the beginning of Greek history, in the vestibule of
the temple, is seen standing first of all the figure of the legislator, himself the interpreter
and servant of the God. The fundamental laws which he gives are not supposed to
change with time and circumstances. The salvation of the state is held rather to depend
on the inviolable maintenance of them. They were sanctioned by the authority of
heaven, and it was deemed impiety to alter them. The desire to maintain them unaltered
seems to be the origin of what at first sight is very surprising to us—the intolerant zeal
of Plato against innovators in religion or politics (Laws); although with a happy
inconsistency he is also willing that the laws of other countries should be studied and
improvements in legislation privately communicated to the Nocturnal Council (Laws).
The additions which were made to them in later ages in order to meet the increasing
complexity of affairs were still ascribed by a fiction to the original legislator; and the
words of such enactments at Athens were disputed over as if they had been the words
of Solon himself. Plato hopes to preserve in a later generation the mind of the legislator;
he would have his citizens remain within the lines which he has laid down for them. He
would not harass them with minute regulations, he would have allowed some changes
in the laws: but not changes which would affect the fundamental institutions of the
state, such for example as would convert an aristocracy into a timocracy, or a timocracy
into a popular form of government.
Passing from speculations to facts, we observe that progress has been the exception
rather than the law of human history. And therefore we are not surprised to find that the
idea of progress is of modern rather than of ancient date; and, like the idea of a
philosophy of history, is not more than a century or two old. It seems to have arisen out
of the impression left on the human mind by the growth of the Roman Empire and of
the Christian Church, and to be due to the political and social improvements which they
introduced into the world; and still more in our own century to the idealism of the first
French Revolution and the triumph of American Independence; and in a yet greater
degree to the vast material prosperity and growth of population in England and her
colonies and in America. It is also to be ascribed in a measure to the greater study of the
philosophy of history. The optimist temperament of some great writers has assisted the
creation of it, while the opposite character has led a few to regard the future of the
world as dark. The ‘spectator of all time and of all existence’ sees more of ‘the increasing
purpose which through the ages ran’ than formerly: but to the inhabitant of a small
state of Hellas the vision was necessarily limited like the valley in which he dwelt. There
was no remote past on which his eye could rest, nor any future from which the veil was
partly lifted up by the analogy of history. The narrowness of view, which to ourselves
appears so singular, was to him natural, if not unavoidable.
5. For the relation of the Republic to the Statesman and the Laws, and the two other
works of Plato which directly treat of politics, see the Introductions to the two latter; a
few general points of comparison may be touched upon in this place.
And first of the Laws.
(1) The Republic, though probably written at intervals, yet speaking generally and
judging by the indications of thought and style, may be reasonably ascribed to the
middle period of Plato’s life: the Laws are certainly the work of his declining years, and
some portions of them at any rate seem to have been written in extreme old age.
(2) The Republic is full of hope and aspiration: the Laws bear the stamp of failure and
disappointment. The one is a finished work which received the last touches of the
author: the other is imperfectly executed, and apparently unfinished. The one has the
grace and beauty of youth: the other has lost the poetical form, but has more of the
severity and knowledge of life which is characteristic of old age.
(3) The most conspicuous defect of the Laws is the failure of dramatic power, whereas
the Republic is full of striking contrasts of ideas and oppositions of character.
(4) The Laws may be said to have more the nature of a sermon, the Republic of a poem;
the one is more religious, the other more intellectual.
(5) Many theories of Plato, such as the doctrine of ideas, the government of the world
by philosophers, are not found in the Laws; the immortality of the soul is first mentioned
in xii; the person of Socrates has altogether disappeared. The community of women and
children is renounced; the institution of common or public meals for women (Laws) is
for the first time introduced (Ar. Pol.).
(6) There remains in the Laws the old enmity to the poets, who are ironically saluted in
high-flown terms, and, at the same time, are peremptorily ordered out of the city, if they
are not willing to submit their poems to the censorship of the magistrates (Rep.).
(7) Though the work is in most respects inferior, there are a few passages in the Laws,
such as the honour due to the soul, the evils of licentious or unnatural love, the whole of
Book x. (religion), the dishonesty of retail trade, and bequests, which come more home
to us, and contain more of what may be termed the modern element in Plato than
almost anything in the Republic.
The relation of the two works to one another is very well given:
(1) by Aristotle in the Politics from the side of the Laws:—
‘The same, or nearly the same, objections apply to Plato’s later work, the Laws, and
therefore we had better examine briefly the constitution which is therein described. In
the Republic, Socrates has definitely settled in all a few questions only; such as the
community of women and children, the community of property, and the constitution of
the state. The population is divided into two classes—one of husbandmen, and the
other of warriors; from this latter is taken a third class of counsellors and rulers of the
state. But Socrates has not determined whether the husbandmen and artists are to have
a share in the government, and whether they too are to carry arms and share in military
service or not. He certainly thinks that the women ought to share in the education of the
guardians, and to fight by their side. The remainder of the work is filled up with
digressions foreign to the main subject, and with discussions about the education of the
guardians. In the Laws there is hardly anything but laws; not much is said about the
constitution. This, which he had intended to make more of the ordinary type, he
gradually brings round to the other or ideal form. For with the exception of the
community of women and property, he supposes everything to be the same in both
states; there is to be the same education; the citizens of both are to live free from servile
occupations, and there are to be common meals in both. The only difference is that in
the Laws the common meals are extended to women, and the warriors number about
5000, but in the Republic only 1000.’
(2) by Plato in the Laws (Book v.), from the side of the Republic:—
‘The first and highest form of the state and of the government and of the law is that in
which there prevails most widely the ancient saying that “Friends have all things in
common.” Whether there is now, or ever will be, this communion of women and
children and of property, in which the private and individual is altogether banished from
life, and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have
become common, and all men express praise and blame, and feel joy and sorrow, on the
same occasions, and the laws unite the city to the utmost,—whether all this is possible
or not, I say that no man, acting upon any other principle, will ever constitute a state
more exalted in virtue, or truer or better than this. Such a state, whether inhabited by
Gods or sons of Gods, will make them blessed who dwell therein; and therefore to this
we are to look for the pattern of the state, and to cling to this, and, as far as possible, to
seek for one which is like this. The state which we have now in hand, when created, will
be nearest to immortality and unity in the next degree; and after that, by the grace of
God, we will complete the third one. And we will begin by speaking of the nature and
origin of the second.’
The comparatively short work called the Statesman or Politicus in its style and manner is
more akin to the Laws, while in its idealism it rather resembles the Republic. As far as we
can judge by various indications of language and thought, it must be later than the one
and of course earlier than the other. In both the Republic and Statesman a close
connection is maintained between Politics and Dialectic. In the Statesman, enquiries into
the principles of Method are interspersed with discussions about Politics. The
comparative advantages of the rule of law and of a person are considered, and the
decision given in favour of a person (Arist. Pol.). But much may be said on the other side,
nor is the opposition necessary; for a person may rule by law, and law may be so applied
as to be the living voice of the legislator. As in the Republic, there is a myth, describing,
however, not a future, but a former existence of mankind. The question is asked,
‘Whether the state of innocence which is described in the myth, or a state like our own
which possesses art and science and distinguishes good from evil, is the preferable
condition of man.’ To this question of the comparative happiness of civilized and
primitive life, which was so often discussed in the last century and in our own, no answer
is given. The Statesman, though less perfect in style than the Republic and of far less
range, may justly be regarded as one of the greatest of Plato’s dialogues.
6. Others as well as Plato have chosen an ideal Republic to be the vehicle of thoughts
which they could not definitely express, or which went beyond their own age. The
classical writing which approaches most nearly to the Republic of Plato is the ‘De
Republica’ of Cicero; but neither in this nor in any other of his dialogues does he rival
the art of Plato. The manners are clumsy and inferior; the hand of the rhetorician is
apparent at every turn. Yet noble sentiments are constantly recurring: the true note of
Roman patriotism—‘We Romans are a great people’—resounds through the whole
work. Like Socrates, Cicero turns away from the phenomena of the heavens to civil and
political life. He would rather not discuss the ‘two Suns’ of which all Rome was talking,
when he can converse about ‘the two nations in one’ which had divided Rome ever since
the days of the Gracchi. Like Socrates again, speaking in the person of Scipio, he is afraid
lest he should assume too much the character of a teacher, rather than of an equal who
is discussing among friends the two sides of a question. He would confine the terms
King or State to the rule of reason and justice, and he will not concede that title either to
a democracy or to a monarchy. But under the rule of reason and justice he is willing to
include the natural superior ruling over the natural inferior, which he compares to the
soul ruling over the body. He prefers a mixture of forms of government to any single
one. The two portraits of the just and the unjust, which occur in the second book of the
Republic, are transferred to the state—Philus, one of the interlocutors, maintaining
against his will the necessity of injustice as a principle of government, while the other,
Laelius, supports the opposite thesis. His views of language and number are derived
from Plato; like him he denounces the drama. He also declares that if his life were to be
twice as long he would have no time to read the lyric poets. The picture of democracy is
translated by him word for word, though he had hardly shown himself able to ‘carry the
jest’ of Plato. He converts into a stately sentence the humorous fancy about the animals,
who ‘are so imbued with the spirit of democracy that they make the passers-by get out
of their way.’ His description of the tyrant is imitated from Plato, but is far inferior. The
second book is historical, and claims for the Roman constitution (which is to him the
ideal) a foundation of fact such as Plato probably intended to have given to the
Republic in the Critias. His most remarkable imitation of Plato is the adaptation of the
vision of Er, which is converted by Cicero into the ‘Somnium Scipionis’; he has
‘romanized’ the myth of the Republic, adding an argument for the immortality of the
soul taken from the Phaedrus, and some other touches derived from the Phaedo and
the Timaeus. Though a beautiful tale and containing splendid passages, the ‘Somnium
Scipionis; is very inferior to the vision of Er; it is only a dream, and hardly allows the
reader to suppose that the writer believes in his own creation. Whether his dialogues
were framed on the model of the lost dialogues of Aristotle, as he himself tells us, or of
Plato, to which they bear many superficial resemblances, he is still the Roman orator; he
is not conversing, but making speeches, and is never able to mould the intractable Latin
to the grace and ease of the Greek Platonic dialogue. But if he is defective in form, much
more is he inferior to the Greek in matter; he nowhere in his philosophical writings
leaves upon our minds the impression of an original thinker.
Plato’s Republic has been said to be a church and not a state; and such an ideal of a city
in the heavens has always hovered over the Christian world, and is embodied in St.
Augustine’s ‘De Civitate Dei,’ which is suggested by the decay and fall of the Roman
Empire, much in the same manner in which we may imagine the Republic of Plato to
have been influenced by the decline of Greek politics in the writer’s own age. The
difference is that in the time of Plato the degeneracy, though certain, was gradual and
insensible: whereas the taking of Rome by the Goths stirred like an earthquake the age
of St. Augustine. Men were inclined to believe that the overthrow of the city was to be
ascribed to the anger felt by the old Roman deities at the neglect of their worship. St.
Augustine maintains the opposite thesis; he argues that the destruction of the Roman
Empire is due, not to the rise of Christianity, but to the vices of Paganism. He wanders
over Roman history, and over Greek philosophy and mythology, and finds everywhere
crime, impiety and falsehood. He compares the worst parts of the Gentile religions with
the best elements of the faith of Christ. He shows nothing of the spirit which led others
of the early Christian Fathers to recognize in the writings of the Greek philosophers the
power of the divine truth. He traces the parallel of the kingdom of God, that is, the
history of the Jews, contained in their scriptures, and of the kingdoms of the world,
which are found in gentile writers, and pursues them both into an ideal future. It need
hardly be remarked that his use both of Greek and of Roman historians and of the
sacred writings of the Jews is wholly uncritical. The heathen mythology, the Sybilline
oracles, the myths of Plato, the dreams of Neo–Platonists are equally regarded by him as
matter of fact. He must be acknowledged to be a strictly polemical or controversial
writer who makes the best of everything on one side and the worst of everything on the
other. He has no sympathy with the old Roman life as Plato has with Greek life, nor has
he any idea of the ecclesiastical kingdom which was to arise out of the ruins of the
Roman empire. He is not blind to the defects of the Christian Church, and looks forward
to a time when Christian and Pagan shall be alike brought before the judgment-seat,
and the true City of God shall appear...The work of St. Augustine is a curious repertory of
antiquarian learning and quotations, deeply penetrated with Christian ethics, but
showing little power of reasoning, and a slender knowledge of the Greek literature and
language. He was a great genius, and a noble character, yet hardly capable of feeling or
understanding anything external to his own theology. Of all the ancient philosophers he
is most attracted by Plato, though he is very slightly acquainted with his writings. He is
inclined to believe that the idea of creation in the Timaeus is derived from the narrative
in Genesis; and he is strangely taken with the coincidence (?) of Plato’s saying that ‘the
philosopher is the lover of God,’ and the words of the Book of Exodus in which God
reveals himself to Moses (Exod.) He dwells at length on miracles performed in his own
day, of which the evidence is regarded by him as irresistible. He speaks in a very
interesting manner of the beauty and utility of nature and of the human frame, which he
conceives to afford a foretaste of the heavenly state and of the resurrection of the body.
The book is not really what to most persons the title of it would imply, and belongs to
an age which has passed away. But it contains many fine passages and thoughts which
are for all time.
The short treatise de Monarchia of Dante is by far the most remarkable of mediaeval
ideals, and bears the impress of the great genius in whom Italy and the Middle Ages are
so vividly reflected. It is the vision of an Universal Empire, which is supposed to be the
natural and necessary government of the world, having a divine authority distinct from
the Papacy, yet coextensive with it. It is not ‘the ghost of the dead Roman Empire sitting
crowned upon the grave thereof,’ but the legitimate heir and successor of it, justified by
the ancient virtues of the Romans and the beneficence of their rule. Their right to be the
governors of the world is also confirmed by the testimony of miracles, and
acknowledged by St. Paul when he appealed to Caesar, and even more emphatically by
Christ Himself, Who could not have made atonement for the sins of men if He had not
been condemned by a divinely authorized tribunal. The necessity for the establishment
of an Universal Empire is proved partly by a priori arguments such as the unity of God
and the unity of the family or nation; partly by perversions of Scripture and history, by
false analogies of nature, by misapplied quotations from the classics, and by odd scraps
and commonplaces of logic, showing a familiar but by no means exact knowledge of
Aristotle (of Plato there is none). But a more convincing argument still is the miserable
state of the world, which he touchingly describes. He sees no hope of happiness or
peace for mankind until all nations of the earth are comprehended in a single empire.
The whole treatise shows how deeply the idea of the Roman Empire was fixed in the
minds of his contemporaries. Not much argument was needed to maintain the truth of a
theory which to his own contemporaries seemed so natural and congenial. He speaks, or
rather preaches, from the point of view, not of the ecclesiastic, but of the layman,
although, as a good Catholic, he is willing to acknowledge that in certain respects the
Empire must submit to the Church. The beginning and end of all his noble reflections
and of his arguments, good and bad, is the aspiration ‘that in this little plot of earth
belonging to mortal man life may pass in freedom and peace.’ So inextricably is his
vision of the future bound up with the beliefs and circumstances of his own age.
The ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More is a surprising monument of his genius, and shows a
reach of thought far beyond his contemporaries. The book was written by him at the
age of about 34 or 35, and is full of the generous sentiments of youth. He brings the
light of Plato to bear upon the miserable state of his own country. Living not long after
the Wars of the Roses, and in the dregs of the Catholic Church in England, he is
indignant at the corruption of the clergy, at the luxury of the nobility and gentry, at the
sufferings of the poor, at the calamities caused by war. To the eye of More the whole
world was in dissolution and decay; and side by side with the misery and oppression
which he has described in the First Book of the Utopia, he places in the Second Book the
ideal state which by the help of Plato he had constructed. The times were full of stir and
intellectual interest. The distant murmur of the Reformation was beginning to be heard.
To minds like More’s, Greek literature was a revelation: there had arisen an art of
interpretation, and the New Testament was beginning to be understood as it had never
been before, and has not often been since, in its natural sense. The life there depicted
appeared to him wholly unlike that of Christian commonwealths, in which ‘he saw
nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under
the name and title of the Commonwealth.’ He thought that Christ, like Plato, ‘instituted
all things common,’ for which reason, he tells us, the citizens of Utopia were the more
willing to receive his doctrines (‘Howbeit, I think this was no small help and furtherance
in the matter, that they heard us say that Christ instituted among his, all things common,
and that the same community doth yet remain in the rightest Christian communities’
(Utopia).). The community of property is a fixed idea with him, though he is aware of the
arguments which may be urged on the other side (‘These things (I say), when I consider
with myself, I hold well with Plato, and do nothing marvel that he would make no laws
for them that refused those laws, whereby all men should have and enjoy equal portions
of riches and commodities. For the wise men did easily foresee this to be the one and
only way to the wealth of a community, if equality of all things should be brought in and
established’ (Utopia).). We wonder how in the reign of Henry VIII, though veiled in
another language and published in a foreign country, such speculations could have
been endured.
He is gifted with far greater dramatic invention than any one who succeeded him, with
the exception of Swift. In the art of feigning he is a worthy disciple of Plato. Like him,
starting from a small portion of fact, he founds his tale with admirable skill on a few
lines in the Latin narrative of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. He is very precise about
dates and facts, and has the power of making us believe that the narrator of the tale
must have been an eyewitness. We are fairly puzzled by his manner of mixing up real
and imaginary persons; his boy John Clement and Peter Giles, citizen of Antwerp, with
whom he disputes about the precise words which are supposed to have been used by
the (imaginary) Portuguese traveller, Raphael Hythloday. ‘I have the more cause,’ says
Hythloday, ‘to fear that my words shall not be believed, for that I know how difficultly
and hardly I myself would have believed another man telling the same, if I had not
myself seen it with mine own eyes.’ Or again: ‘If you had been with me in Utopia, and
had presently seen their fashions and laws as I did which lived there five years and more,
and would never have come thence, but only to make the new land known here,’ etc.
More greatly regrets that he forgot to ask Hythloday in what part of the world Utopia is
situated; he ‘would have spent no small sum of money rather than it should have
escaped him,’ and he begs Peter Giles to see Hythloday or write to him and obtain an
answer to the question. After this we are not surprised to hear that a Professor of
Divinity (perhaps ‘a late famous vicar of Croydon in Surrey,’ as the translator thinks) is
desirous of being sent thither as a missionary by the High Bishop, ‘yea, and that he may
himself be made Bishop of Utopia, nothing doubting that he must obtain this Bishopric
with suit; and he counteth that a godly suit which proceedeth not of the desire of
honour or lucre, but only of a godly zeal.’ The design may have failed through the
disappearance of Hythloday, concerning whom we have ‘very uncertain news’ after his
departure. There is no doubt, however, that he had told More and Giles the exact
situation of the island, but unfortunately at the same moment More’s attention, as he is
reminded in a letter from Giles, was drawn off by a servant, and one of the company
from a cold caught on shipboard coughed so loud as to prevent Giles from hearing. And
‘the secret has perished’ with him; to this day the place of Utopia remains unknown.
The words of Phaedrus, ‘O Socrates, you can easily invent Egyptians or anything,’ are
recalled to our mind as we read this lifelike fiction. Yet the greater merit of the work is
not the admirable art, but the originality of thought. More is as free as Plato from the
prejudices of his age, and far more tolerant. The Utopians do not allow him who
believes not in the immortality of the soul to share in the administration of the state
(Laws), ‘howbeit they put him to no punishment, because they be persuaded that it is in
no man’s power to believe what he list’; and ‘no man is to be blamed for reasoning in
support of his own religion (‘One of our company in my presence was sharply punished.
He, as soon as he was baptised, began, against our wills, with more earnest affection
than wisdom, to reason of Christ’s religion, and began to wax so hot in his matter, that
he did not only prefer our religion before all other, but also did despise and condemn all
other, calling them profane, and the followers of them wicked and devilish, and the
children of everlasting damnation. When he had thus long reasoned the matter, they
laid hold on him, accused him, and condemned him into exile, not as a despiser of
religion, but as a seditious person and a raiser up of dissension among the people’).’ In
the public services ‘no prayers be used, but such as every man may boldly pronounce
without giving offence to any sect.’ He says significantly, ‘There be that give worship to a
man that was once of excellent virtue or of famous glory, not only as God, but also the
chiefest and highest God. But the most and the wisest part, rejecting all these, believe
that there is a certain godly power unknown, far above the capacity and reach of man’s
wit, dispersed throughout all the world, not in bigness, but in virtue and power. Him
they call the Father of all. To Him alone they attribute the beginnings, the increasings,
the proceedings, the changes, and the ends of all things. Neither give they any divine
honours to any other than him.’ So far was More from sharing the popular beliefs of his
time. Yet at the end he reminds us that he does not in all respects agree with the
customs and opinions of the Utopians which he describes. And we should let him have
the benefit of this saving clause, and not rudely withdraw the veil behind which he has
been pleased to conceal himself.
Nor is he less in advance of popular opinion in his political and moral speculations. He
would like to bring military glory into contempt; he would set all sorts of idle people to
profitable occupation, including in the same class, priests, women, noblemen,
gentlemen, and ‘sturdy and valiant beggars,’ that the labour of all may be reduced to six
hours a day. His dislike of capital punishment, and plans for the reformation of
offenders; his detestation of priests and lawyers (Compare his satirical observation: ‘They
(the Utopians) have priests of exceeding holiness, and therefore very few.); his remark
that ‘although every one may hear of ravenous dogs and wolves and cruel man-eaters, it
is not easy to find states that are well and wisely governed,’ are curiously at variance
with the notions of his age and indeed with his own life. There are many points in which
he shows a modern feeling and a prophetic insight like Plato. He is a sanitary reformer;
he maintains that civilized states have a right to the soil of waste countries; he is inclined
to the opinion which places happiness in virtuous pleasures, but herein, as he thinks, not
disagreeing from those other philosophers who define virtue to be a life according to
nature. He extends the idea of happiness so as to include the happiness of others; and
he argues ingeniously, ‘All men agree that we ought to make others happy; but if others,
how much more ourselves!’ And still he thinks that there may be a more excellent way,
but to this no man’s reason can attain unless heaven should inspire him with a higher
truth. His ceremonies before marriage; his humane proposal that war should be carried
on by assassinating the leaders of the enemy, may be compared to some of the
paradoxes of Plato. He has a charming fancy, like the affinities of Greeks and barbarians
in the Timaeus, that the Utopians learnt the language of the Greeks with the more
readiness because they were originally of the same race with them. He is penetrated
with the spirit of Plato, and quotes or adapts many thoughts both from the Republic
and from the Timaeus. He prefers public duties to private, and is somewhat impatient of
the importunity of relations. His citizens have no silver or gold of their own, but are
ready enough to pay them to their mercenaries. There is nothing of which he is more
contemptuous than the love of money. Gold is used for fetters of criminals, and
diamonds and pearls for children’s necklaces (When the ambassadors came arrayed in
gold and peacocks’ feathers ‘to the eyes of all the Utopians except very few, which had
been in other countries for some reasonable cause, all that gorgeousness of apparel
seemed shameful and reproachful. In so much that they most reverently saluted the
vilest and most abject of them for lords—passing over the ambassadors themselves
without any honour, judging them by their wearing of golden chains to be bondmen.
You should have seen children also, that had cast away their pearls and precious stones,
when they saw the like sticking upon the ambassadors’ caps, dig and push their mothers
under the sides, saying thus to them—“Look, though he were a little child still.” But the
mother; yea and that also in good earnest: “Peace, son,” saith she, “I think he be some of
the ambassadors’ fools.”’)
Like Plato he is full of satirical reflections on governments and princes; on the state of
the world and of knowledge. The hero of his discourse (Hythloday) is very unwilling to
become a minister of state, considering that he would lose his independence and his
advice would never be heeded (Compare an exquisite passage, of which the conclusion
is as follows: ‘And verily it is naturally given...suppressed and ended.’) He ridicules the
new logic of his time; the Utopians could never be made to understand the doctrine of
Second Intentions (‘For they have not devised one of all those rules of restrictions,
amplifications, and suppositions, very wittily invented in the small Logicals, which here
our children in every place do learn. Furthermore, they were never yet able to find out
the second intentions; insomuch that none of them all could ever see man himself in
common, as they call him, though he be (as you know) bigger than was ever any giant,
yea, and pointed to of us even with our finger.’) He is very severe on the sports of the
gentry; the Utopians count ‘hunting the lowest, the vilest, and the most abject part of
butchery.’ He quotes the words of the Republic in which the philosopher is described
‘standing out of the way under a wall until the driving storm of sleet and rain be
overpast,’ which admit of a singular application to More’s own fate; although, writing
twenty years before (about the year 1514), he can hardly be supposed to have foreseen
this. There is no touch of satire which strikes deeper than his quiet remark that the
greater part of the precepts of Christ are more at variance with the lives of ordinary
Christians than the discourse of Utopia (‘And yet the most part of them is more
dissident from the manners of the world now a days, than my communication was. But
preachers, sly and wily men, following your counsel (as I suppose) because they saw
men evil-willing to frame their manners to Christ’s rule, they have wrested and wried his
doctrine, and, like a rule of lead, have applied it to men’s manners, that by some means
at the least way, they might agree together.’)
The ‘New Atlantis’ is only a fragment, and far inferior in merit to the ‘Utopia.’ The work is
full of ingenuity, but wanting in creative fancy, and by no means impresses the reader
with a sense of credibility. In some places Lord Bacon is characteristically different from
Sir Thomas More, as, for example, in the external state which he attributes to the
governor of Solomon’s House, whose dress he minutely describes, while to Sir Thomas
More such trappings appear simple ridiculous. Yet, after this programme of dress, Bacon
adds the beautiful trait, ‘that he had a look as though he pitied men.’ Several things are
borrowed by him from the Timaeus; but he has injured the unity of style by adding
thoughts and passages which are taken from the Hebrew Scriptures.
The ‘City of the Sun’ written by Campanella (1568–1639), a Dominican friar, several years
after the ‘New Atlantis’ of Bacon, has many resemblances to the Republic of Plato. The
citizens have wives and children in common; their marriages are of the same temporary
sort, and are arranged by the magistrates from time to time. They do not, however,
adopt his system of lots, but bring together the best natures, male and female,
‘according to philosophical rules.’ The infants until two years of age are brought up by
their mothers in public temples; and since individuals for the most part educate their
children badly, at the beginning of their third year they are committed to the care of the
State, and are taught at first, not out of books, but from paintings of all kinds, which are
emblazoned on the walls of the city. The city has six interior circuits of walls, and an
outer wall which is the seventh. On this outer wall are painted the figures of legislators
and philosophers, and on each of the interior walls the symbols or forms of some one of
the sciences are delineated. The women are, for the most part, trained, like the men, in
warlike and other exercises; but they have two special occupations of their own. After a
battle, they and the boys soothe and relieve the wounded warriors; also they encourage
them with embraces and pleasant words. Some elements of the Christian or Catholic
religion are preserved among them. The life of the Apostles is greatly admired by this
people because they had all things in common; and the short prayer which Jesus Christ
taught men is used in their worship. It is a duty of the chief magistrates to pardon sins,
and therefore the whole people make secret confession of them to the magistrates, and
they to their chief, who is a sort of Rector Metaphysicus; and by this means he is well
informed of all that is going on in the minds of men. After confession, absolution is
granted to the citizens collectively, but no one is mentioned by name. There also exists
among them a practice of perpetual prayer, performed by a succession of priests, who
change every hour. Their religion is a worship of God in Trinity, that is of Wisdom, Love
and Power, but without any distinction of persons. They behold in the sun the reflection
of His glory; mere graven images they reject, refusing to fall under the ‘tyranny’ of
idolatry.
Many details are given about their customs of eating and drinking, about their mode of
dressing, their employments, their wars. Campanella looks forward to a new mode of
education, which is to be a study of nature, and not of Aristotle. He would not have his
citizens waste their time in the consideration of what he calls ‘the dead signs of things.’
He remarks that he who knows one science only, does not really know that one any
more than the rest, and insists strongly on the necessity of a variety of knowledge. More
scholars are turned out in the City of the Sun in one year than by contemporary
methods in ten or fifteen. He evidently believes, like Bacon, that henceforward natural
science will play a great part in education, a hope which seems hardly to have been
realized, either in our own or in any former age; at any rate the fulfilment of it has been
long deferred.
There is a good deal of ingenuity and even originality in this work, and a most
enlightened spirit pervades it. But it has little or no charm of style, and falls very far short
of the ‘New Atlantis’ of Bacon, and still more of the ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More. It is full
of inconsistencies, and though borrowed from Plato, shows but a superficial
acquaintance with his writings. It is a work such as one might expect to have been
written by a philosopher and man of genius who was also a friar, and who had spent
twenty-seven years of his life in a prison of the Inquisition. The most interesting feature
of the book, common to Plato and Sir Thomas More, is the deep feeling which is shown
by the writer, of the misery and ignorance prevailing among the lower classes in his own
time. Campanella takes note of Aristotle’s answer to Plato’s community of property, that
in a society where all things are common, no individual would have any motive to work
(Arist. Pol.): he replies, that his citizens being happy and contented in themselves (they
are required to work only four hours a day), will have greater regard for their fellows
than exists among men at present. He thinks, like Plato, that if he abolishes private
feelings and interests, a great public feeling will take their place.
Other writings on ideal states, such as the ‘Oceana’ of Harrington, in which the Lord
Archon, meaning Cromwell, is described, not as he was, but as he ought to have been;
or the ‘Argenis’ of Barclay, which is an historical allegory of his own time, are too unlike
Plato to be worth mentioning. More interesting than either of these, and far more
Platonic in style and thought, is Sir John Eliot’s ‘Monarchy of Man,’ in which the prisoner
of the Tower, no longer able ‘to be a politician in the land of his birth,’ turns away from
politics to view ‘that other city which is within him,’ and finds on the very threshold of
the grave that the secret of human happiness is the mastery of self. The change of
government in the time of the English Commonwealth set men thinking about first
principles, and gave rise to many works of this class...The great original genius of Swift
owes nothing to Plato; nor is there any trace in the conversation or in the works of Dr.
Johnson of any acquaintance with his writings. He probably would have refuted Plato
without reading him, in the same fashion in which he supposed himself to have refuted
Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the non-existence of matter. If we except the so-called
English Platonists, or rather Neo–Platonists, who never understood their master, and the
writings of Coleridge, who was to some extent a kindred spirit, Plato has left no
permanent impression on English literature.
7. Human life and conduct are affected by ideals in the same way that they are affected
by the examples of eminent men. Neither the one nor the other are immediately
applicable to practice, but there is a virtue flowing from them which tends to raise
individuals above the common routine of society or trade, and to elevate States above
the mere interests of commerce or the necessities of self-defence. Like the ideals of art
they are partly framed by the omission of particulars; they require to be viewed at a
certain distance, and are apt to fade away if we attempt to approach them. They gain an
imaginary distinctness when embodied in a State or in a system of philosophy, but they
still remain the visions of ‘a world unrealized.’ More striking and obvious to the ordinary
mind are the examples of great men, who have served their own generation and are
remembered in another. Even in our own family circle there may have been some one, a
woman, or even a child, in whose face has shone forth a goodness more than human.
The ideal then approaches nearer to us, and we fondly cling to it. The ideal of the past,
whether of our own past lives or of former states of society, has a singular fascination
for the minds of many. Too late we learn that such ideals cannot be recalled, though the
recollection of them may have a humanizing influence on other times. But the
abstractions of philosophy are to most persons cold and vacant; they give light without
warmth; they are like the full moon in the heavens when there are no stars appearing.
Men cannot live by thought alone; the world of sense is always breaking in upon them.
They are for the most part confined to a corner of earth, and see but a little way beyond
their own home or place of abode; they ‘do not lift up their eyes to the hills’; they are
not awake when the dawn appears. But in Plato we have reached a height from which a
man may look into the distance and behold the future of the world and of philosophy.
The ideal of the State and of the life of the philosopher; the ideal of an education
continuing through life and extending equally to both sexes; the ideal of the unity and
correlation of knowledge; the faith in good and immortality—are the vacant forms of
light on which Plato is seeking to fix the eye of mankind.
8. Two other ideals, which never appeared above the horizon in Greek Philosophy, float
before the minds of men in our own day: one seen more clearly than formerly, as
though each year and each generation brought us nearer to some great change; the
other almost in the same degree retiring from view behind the laws of nature, as if
oppressed by them, but still remaining a silent hope of we know not what hidden in the
heart of man. The first ideal is the future of the human race in this world; the second the
future of the individual in another. The first is the more perfect realization of our own
present life; the second, the abnegation of it: the one, limited by experience, the other,
transcending it. Both of them have been and are powerful motives of action; there are a
few in whom they have taken the place of all earthly interests. The hope of a future for
the human race at first sight seems to be the more disinterested, the hope of individual
existence the more egotistical, of the two motives. But when men have learned to
resolve their hope of a future either for themselves or for the world into the will of
God—‘not my will but Thine,’ the difference between them falls away; and they may be
allowed to make either of them the basis of their lives, according to their own individual
character or temperament. There is as much faith in the willingness to work for an
unseen future in this world as in another. Neither is it inconceivable that some rare
nature may feel his duty to another generation, or to another century, almost as strongly
as to his own, or that living always in the presence of God, he may realize another world
as vividly as he does this.
The greatest of all ideals may, or rather must be conceived by us under similitudes
derived from human qualities; although sometimes, like the Jewish prophets, we may
dash away these figures of speech and describe the nature of God only in negatives.
These again by degrees acquire a positive meaning. It would be well, if when meditating
on the higher truths either of philosophy or religion, we sometimes substituted one
form of expression for another, lest through the necessities of language we should
become the slaves of mere words.
There is a third ideal, not the same, but akin to these, which has a place in the home and
heart of every believer in the religion of Christ, and in which men seem to find a nearer
and more familiar truth, the Divine man, the Son of Man, the Saviour of mankind, Who is
the first-born and head of the whole family in heaven and earth, in Whom the Divine
and human, that which is without and that which is within the range of our earthly
faculties, are indissolubly united. Neither is this divine form of goodness wholly
separable from the ideal of the Christian Church, which is said in the New Testament to
be ‘His body,’ or at variance with those other images of good which Plato sets before us.
We see Him in a figure only, and of figures of speech we select but a few, and those the
simplest, to be the expression of Him. We behold Him in a picture, but He is not there.
We gather up the fragments of His discourses, but neither do they represent Him as He
truly was. His dwelling is neither in heaven nor earth, but in the heart of man. This is that
image which Plato saw dimly in the distance, which, when existing among men, he
called, in the language of Homer, ‘the likeness of God,’ the likeness of a nature which in
all ages men have felt to be greater and better than themselves, and which in endless
forms, whether derived from Scripture or nature, from the witness of history or from the
human heart, regarded as a person or not as a person, with or without parts or passions,
existing in space or not in space, is and will always continue to be to mankind the Idea
of Good.

THE REPUBLIC

BOOK I
OF WEALTH,
JUSTICE,
MODERATION,
AND THEIR
OPPOSITES
Persons of the Dialogue :-
SOCRATES, who is the narrator.CEPHALUS.GLACON. THRASYMACHUS.
ADEIMANTUS. CLEITOPHON.POLEMARCHUS.And others who are mute auditors.
The scene is laid in the house of Cephalus at the Piraeus; and the whole dialogue is
narrated by Socrates the day after it actually took place to Timaeus Hermocrates, Critias,
and a nameless person, who are introduced in the Timaeus.
I WENT down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, that I might
offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner
they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the
procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more,
beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the
direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, chanced to
catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his
servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind,
and said, Polemarchus desires you to wait.
I turned round, and asked him where his master was.
There he is, said the youth, coming after you, if you will only wait.
Certainly we will, said Glaucon; and in a few minutes Polemarchus appeared, and with
him Adeimantus, Glaucon's brother, Niceratus, the son of Nicias, and several others who
had been at the procession.
Polemarchus said to me, I perceive, Socrates, that you and your companion are already
on your way to the city.
You are not far wrong, I said.
But do you see, he rejoined, how many we are?
Of course.
And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to remain where you are.
May there not be the alternative, I said, that we may persuade you to let us go?
But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you? he said.
Certainly not, replied Glaucon.
Then we are not going to listen; of that you may be assured.
Adeimantus added: Has no one told you of the torch-race on horseback in honor of the
goddess which will take place in the evening?
With horses! I replied. That is a novelty. Will horsemen carry torches and pass them one
to another during the race?
Yes, said Polemarchus; and not only so, but a festival will be celebrated at night, which
you certainly ought to see. Let us rise soon after supper and see this festival; there will
be a gathering of young men, and we will have a good talk. Stay then, and do not be
perverse.
Glaucon said, I suppose, since you insist, that we must.
Very good, I replied.
Accordingly we went with Polemarchus to his house; and there we found his brothers
Lysias and Euthydemus, and with them Thrasymachus the Chalcedonian, Charmantides
the Paeanian, and Cleitophon, the son of Aristonymus. There too was Cephalus, the
father of Polemarchus, whom I had not seen for a long time, and I thought him very
much aged. He was seated on a cushioned chair, and had a garland on his head, for he
had been sacrificing in the court; and there were some other chairs in the room
arranged in a semicircle, upon which we sat down by him. He saluted me eagerly, and
then he said:
You don't come to see me, Socrates, as often as you ought: If I were still able to go and
see you I would not ask you to come to me. But at my age I can hardly get to the city,
and therefore you should come oftener to the Piraeus. For, let me tell you that the more
the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me are the pleasure and charm of
conversation. Do not, then, deny my request, but make our house your resort and keep
company with these young men; we are old friends, and you will be quite at home with
us.
I replied: There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with
aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have
to go, and of whom I ought to inquire whether the way is smooth and easy or rugged
and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you, who have arrived at
that time which the poets call the "threshold of old age": Is life harder toward the end,
or what report do you give of it?
I will tell you, Socrates, he said, what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together;
we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the tale of my
acquaintance commonly is: I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love
are fled away; there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer
life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will
tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. But to me, Socrates, these
complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the
cause, I too, being old, and every other old man would have felt as they do. But this is
not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I remember
the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age,
Sophocles—are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I
escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious
master. His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me
now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of
calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are
freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates,
that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the
same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a
calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an
opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.
I listened in admiration, and wanting to draw him out, that he might go on—Yes,
Cephalus, I said; but I rather suspect that people in general are not convinced by you
when you speak thus; they think that old age sits lightly upon you, not because of your
happy disposition, but because you are rich, and wealth is well known to be a great
comforter.
You are right, he replied; they are not convinced: and there is something in what they
say; not, however, so much as they imagine. I might answer them as Themistocles
answered the Seriphian who was abusing him and saying that he was famous, not for his
own merits but because he was an Athenian: "If you had been a native of my country or
I of yours, neither of us would have been famous." And to those who are not rich and
are impatient of old age, the same reply may be made; for to the good poor man old
age cannot be a light burden, nor can a bad rich man ever have peace with himself.
May I ask, Cephalus, whether your fortune was for the most part inherited or acquired
by you?
Acquired! Socrates; do you want to know how much I acquired? In the art of making
money I have been midway between my father and grandfather: for my grandfather,
whose name I bear, doubled and trebled the value of his patrimony, that which he
inherited being much what I possess now; but my father, Lysanias, reduced the property
below what it is at present; and I shall be satisfied if I leave to these my sons not less,
but a little more, than I received.
That was why I asked you the question, I replied, because I see that you are indifferent
about money, which is a characteristic rather of those who have inherited their fortunes
than of those who have acquired them; the makers of fortunes have a second love of
money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own
poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use
and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad
company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth. That is true, he said.
Yes, that is very true, but may I ask another question?— What do you consider to be the
greatest blessing which you have reaped from your wealth?
One, he said, of which I could not expect easily to convince others. For let me tell you,
Socrates, that when a man thinks himself to be near death, fears and cares enter into his
mind which he never had before; the tales of a world below and the punishment which
is exacted there of deeds done here were once a laughing matter to him, but now he is
tormented with the thought that they may be true: either from the weakness of age, or
because he is now drawing nearer to that other place, he has a clearer view of these
things; suspicions and alarms crowd thickly upon him, and he begins to reflect and
consider what wrongs he has done to others. And when he finds that the sum of his
transgressions is great he will many a time like a child start up in his sleep for fear, and
he is filled with dark forebodings. But to him who is conscious of no sin, sweet hope, as
Pindar charmingly says, is the kind nurse of his age:
"Hope," he says, "cherishes the soul of him who lives in justice and holiness, and is the
nurse of his age and the companion of his journey— hope which is mightiest to sway
the restless soul of man."
How admirable are his words! And the great blessing of riches, I do not say to every
man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to deceive or to defraud others,
either intentionally or unintentionally; and when he departs to the world below he is not
in any apprehension about offerings due to the gods or debts which he owes to men.
Now to this peace of mind the possession of wealth greatly contributes; and therefore I
say, that, setting one thing against another, of the many advantages which wealth has to
give, to a man of sense this is in my opinion the greatest.
Well said, Cephalus, I replied; but as concerning justice, what is it?—to speak the truth
and to pay your debts—no more than this? And even to this are there not exceptions?
Suppose that a friend when in his right mind has deposited arms with me and he asks
for them when he is not in his right mind, ought I to give them back to him? No one
would say that I ought or that I should be right in doing so, any more than they would
say that I ought always to speak the truth to one who is in his condition.
You are quite right, he replied.
But then, I said, speaking the truth and paying your debts is not a correct definition of
justice.
Quite correct, Socrates, if Simonides is to be believed, said Polemarchus, interposing.
I fear, said Cephalus, that I must go now, for I have to look after the sacrifices, and I
hand over the argument to Polemarchus and the company.
Is not Polemarchus your heir? I said.
To be sure, he answered, and went away laughing to the sacrifices.
Tell me then, O thou heir of the argument, what did Simonides say, and according to
you, truly say, about justice?
He said that the repayment of a debt is just, and in saying so he appears to me to be
right.
I shall be sorry to doubt the word of such a wise and inspired man, but his meaning,
though probably clear to you, is the reverse of clear to me. For he certainly does not
mean, as we were just now saying, that I ought to return a deposit of arms or of
anything else to one who asks for it when he is not in his right senses; and yet a deposit
cannot be denied to be a debt.
True.
Then when the person who asks me is not in his right mind I am by no means to make
the return?
Certainly not.
When Simonides said that the repayment of a debt was justice, he did not mean to
include that case?
Certainly not; for he thinks that a friend ought always to do good to a friend, and never
evil.
You mean that the return of a deposit of gold which is to the injury of the receiver, if the
two parties are friends, is not the repayment of a debt—that is what you would imagine
him to say?
Yes.
And are enemies also to receive what we owe to them?
To be sure, he said, they are to receive what we owe them; and an enemy, as I take it,
owes to an enemy that which is due or proper to him—that is to say, evil.
Simonides, then, after the manner of poets, would seem to have spoken darkly of the
nature of justice; for he really meant to say that justice is the giving to each man what is
proper to him, and this he termed a debt.
That must have been his meaning, he said.
By heaven! I replied; and if we asked him what due or proper thing is given by medicine,
and to whom, what answer do you think that he would make to us?
He would surely reply that medicine gives drugs and meat and drink to human bodies.
And what due or proper thing is given by cookery, and to what?
Seasoning to food.
And what is that which justice gives, and to whom?
If, Socrates, we are to be guided at all by the analogy of the preceding instances, then
justice is the art which gives good to friends and evil to enemies.
That is his meaning, then?
I think so.
And who is best able to do good to his friends and evil to his enemies in time of
sickness?
The physician.
Or when they are on a voyage, amid the perils of the sea?
The pilot.
And in what sort of actions or with a view to what result is the just man most able to do
harm to his enemy and good to his friend?
In going to war against the one and in making alliances with the other.
But when a man is well, my dear Polemarchus, there is no need of a physician?
No.
And he who is not on a voyage has no need of a pilot?
No.
Then in time of peace justice will be of no use?
I am very far from thinking so.
You think that justice may be of use in peace as well as in war?
Yes.
Like husbandry for the acquisition of corn?
Yes.
Or like shoemaking for the acquisition of shoes—that is what you mean?
Yes.
And what similar use or power of acquisition has justice in time of peace?
In contracts, Socrates, justice is of use.
And by contracts you mean partnerships?
Exactly.
But is the just man or the skilful player a more useful and better partner at a game of
draughts?
The skilful player.
And in the laying of bricks and stones is the just man a more useful or better partner
than the builder?
Quite the reverse.
Then in what sort of partnership is the just man a better partner than the harp-player, as
in playing the harp the harpplayer is certainly a better partner than the just man?
In a money partnership.
Yes, Polemarchus, but surely not in the use of money; for you do not want a just man to
be your counsellor in the purchase or sale of a horse; a man who is knowing about
horses would be better for that, would he not?
Certainly.
And when you want to buy a ship, the shipwright or the pilot would be better?
True.
Then what is that joint use of silver or gold in which the just man is to be preferred?
When you want a deposit to be kept safely.
You mean when money is not wanted, but allowed to lie?
Precisely.
That is to say, justice is useful when money is useless?
That is the inference.
And when you want to keep a pruning-hook safe, then justice is useful to the individual
and to the State; but when you want to use it, then the art of the vine-dresser?
Clearly.
And when you want to keep a shield or a lyre, and not to use them, you would say that
justice is useful; but when you want to use them, then the art of the soldier or of the
musician?
Certainly.
And so of all other things—justice is useful when they are useless, and useless when
they are useful?
That is the inference.
Then justice is not good for much. But let us consider this further point: Is not he who
can best strike a blow in a boxing match or in any kind of fighting best able to ward off
a blow?
Certainly.
And he who is most skilful in preventing or escaping from a disease is best able to
create one?
True.
And he is the best guard of a camp who is best able to steal a march upon the enemy?
Certainly.
Then he who is a good keeper of anything is also a good thief?
That, I suppose, is to be inferred.
Then if the just man is good at keeping money, he is good at stealing it.
That is implied in the argument.
Then after all, the just man has turned out to be a thief. And this is a lesson which I
suspect you must have learnt out of Homer; for he, speaking of Autolycus, the maternal
grandfather of Odysseus, who is a favorite of his, affirms that
"He was excellent above all men in theft and perjury."
And so, you and Homer and Simonides are agreed that justice is an art of theft; to be
practised, however, "for the good of friends and for the harm of enemies"—that was
what you were saying?
No, certainly not that, though I do not now know what I did say; but I still stand by the
latter words.
Well, there is another question: By friends and enemies do we mean those who are so
really, or only in seeming?
Surely, he said, a man may be expected to love those whom he thinks good, and to hate
those whom he thinks evil.
Yes, but do not persons often err about good and evil: many who are not good seem to
be so, and conversely?
That is true.
Then to them the good will be enemies and the evil will be their friends? True.
And in that case they will be right in doing good to the evil and evil to the good?
Clearly.
But the good are just and would not do an injustice?
True.
Then according to your argument it is just to injure those who do no wrong?
Nay, Socrates; the doctrine is immoral.
Then I suppose that we ought to do good to the just and harm to the unjust?
I like that better.
But see the consequence: Many a man who is ignorant of human nature has friends who
are bad friends, and in that case he ought to do harm to them; and he has good
enemies whom he ought to benefit; but, if so, we shall be saying the very opposite of
that which we affirmed to be the meaning of Simonides.
Very true, he said; and I think that we had better correct an error into which we seem to
have fallen in the use of the words "friend" and "enemy."
What was the error, Polemarchus? I asked.
We assumed that he is a friend who seems to be or who is thought good.
And how is the error to be corrected?
We should rather say that he is a friend who is, as well as seems, good; and that he who
seems only and is not good, only seems to be and is not a friend; and of an enemy the
same may be said.
You would argue that the good are our friends and the bad our enemies?
Yes.
And instead of saying simply as we did at first, that it is just to do good to our friends
and harm to our enemies, we should further say: It is just to do good to our friends
when they are good, and harm to our enemies when they are evil?
Yes, that appears to me to be the truth.
But ought the just to injure anyone at all?
Undoubtedly he ought to injure those who are both wicked and his enemies.
When horses are injured, are they improved or deteriorated?
The latter.
Deteriorated, that is to say, in the good qualities of horses, not of dogs?
Yes, of horses.
And dogs are deteriorated in the good qualities of dogs, and not of horses?
Of course.
And will not men who are injured be deteriorated in that which is the proper virtue of
man?
Certainly.
And that human virtue is justice?
To be sure.
Then men who are injured are of necessity made unjust?
That is the result.
But can the musician by his art make men unmusical?
Certainly not.
Or the horseman by his art make them bad horsemen?
Impossible.
And can the just by justice make men unjust, or speaking generally, can the good by
virtue make them bad?
Assuredly not.
Any more than heat can produce cold?
It cannot.
Or drought moisture?
Clearly not.
Nor can the good harm anyone?
Impossible.
And the just is the good?
Certainly.
Then to injure a friend or anyone else is not the act of a just man, but of the opposite,
who is the unjust?
I think that what you say is quite true, Socrates.
Then if a man says that justice consists in the repayment of debts, and that good is the
debt which a just man owes to his friends, and evil the debt which he owes to his
enemies—to say this is not wise; for it is not true, if, as has been clearly shown, the
injuring of another can be in no case just.
I agree with you, said Polemarchus.
Then you and I are prepared to take up arms against anyone who attributes such a
saying to Simonides or Bias or Pittacus, or any other wise man or seer?
I am quite ready to do battle at your side, he said.
Shall I tell you whose I believe the saying to be?
Whose?
I believe that Periander or Perdiccas or Xerxes or Ismenias the Theban, or some other
rich and mighty man, who had a great opinion of his own power, was the first to say
that justice is "doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies."
Most true, he said.
Yes, I said; but if this definition of justice also breaks down, what other can be offered?
Several times in the course of the discussion Thrasymachus had made an attempt to get
the argument into his own hands, and had been put down by the rest of the company,
who wanted to hear the end. But when Polemarchus and I had done speaking and there
was a pause, he could no longer hold his peace; and, gathering himself up, he came at
us like a wild beast, seeking to devour us. We were quite panic-stricken at the sight of
him.
He roared out to the whole company: What folly, Socrates, has taken possession of you
all? And why, sillybillies, do you knock under to one another? I say that if you want really
to know what justice is, you should not only ask but answer, and you should not seek
honor to yourself from the refutation of an opponent, but have your own answer; for
there is many a one who can ask and cannot answer. And now I will not have you say
that justice is duty or advantage or profit or gain or interest, for this sort of nonsense
will not do for me; I must have clearness and accuracy.
I was panic-stricken at his words, and could not look at him without trembling. Indeed I
believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I should have been struck dumb: but
when I saw his fury rising, I looked at him first, and was therefore able to reply to him.
Thrasymachus, I said, with a quiver, don't be hard upon us. Polemarchus and I may have
been guilty of a little mistake in the argument, but I can assure you that the error was
not intentional. If we were seeking for a piece of gold, you would not imagine that we
were "knocking under to one another," and so losing our chance of finding it. And why,
when we are seeking for justice, a thing more precious than many pieces of gold, do you
say that we are weakly yielding to one another and not doing our utmost to get at the
truth? Nay, my good friend, we are most willing and anxious to do so, but the fact is that
we cannot. And if so, you people who know all things should pity us and not be angry
with us.
How characteristic of Socrates! he replied, with a bitter laugh; that's your ironical style!
Did I not foresee—have I not already told you, that whatever he was asked he would
refuse to answer, and try irony or any other shuffle, in order that he might avoid
answering?
You are a philosopher, Thrasymachus, I replied, and well know that if you ask a person
what numbers make up twelve, taking care to prohibit him whom you ask from
answering twice six, or three times four, or six times two, or four times three, "for this
sort of nonsense will not do for me"—then obviously, if that is your way of putting the
question, no one can answer you. But suppose that he were to retort: " Thrasymachus,
what do you mean? If one of these numbers which you interdict be the true answer to
the question, am I falsely to say some other number which is not the right one?—is that
your meaning?"—How would you answer him?
Just as if the two cases were at all alike! he said.
Why should they not be? I replied; and even if they are not, but only appear to be so to
the person who is asked, ought he not to say what he thinks, whether you and I forbid
him or not?
I presume then that you are going to make one of the interdicted answers?
I dare say that I may, notwithstanding the danger, if upon reflection I approve of any of
them.
But what if I give you an answer about justice other and better, he said, than any of
these? What do you deserve to have done to you?
Done to me!—as becomes the ignorant, I must learn from the wise—that is what I
deserve to have done to me.
What, and no payment! A pleasant notion!
I will pay when I have the money, I replied.
But you have, Socrates, said Glaucon: and you, Thrasymachus, need be under no anxiety
about money, for we will all make a contribution for Socrates.
Yes, he replied, and then Socrates will do as he always does —refuse to answer himself,
but take and pull to pieces the answer of someone else.
Why, my good friend, I said, how can anyone answer who knows, and says that he
knows, just nothing; and who, even if he has some faint notions of his own, is told by a
man of authority not to utter them? The natural thing is, that the speaker should be
someone like yourself who professes to know and can tell what he knows. Will you then
kindly answer, for the edification of the company and of myself?
Glaucon and the rest of the company joined in my request, and Thrasymachus, as
anyone might see, was in reality eager to speak; for he thought that he had an excellent
answer, and would distinguish himself. But at first he affected to insist on my answering;
at length he consented to begin. Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he refuses to
teach himself, and goes about learning of others, to whom he never even says, Thank
you.
That I learn of others, I replied, is quite true; but that I am ungrateful I wholly deny.
Money I have none, and therefore I pay in praise, which is all I have; and how ready I am
to praise anyone who appears to me to speak well you will very soon find out when you
answer; for I expect that you will answer well.
Listen, then, he said; I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the
stronger. And now why do you not praise me? But of course you won't.
Let me first understand you, I replied. Justice, as you say, is the interest of the stronger.
What, Thrasymachus, is the meaning of this? You cannot mean to say that because
Polydamas, the pancratiast, is stronger than we are, and finds the eating of beef
conducive to his bodily strength, that to eat beef is therefore equally for our good who
are weaker than he is, and right and just for us?
That's abominable of you, Socrates; you take the words in the sense which is most
damaging to the argument.
Not at all, my good sir, I said; I am trying to understand them; and I wish that you would
be a little clearer.
Well, he said, have you never heard that forms of government differ—there are
tyrannies, and there are democracies, and there are aristocracies?
Yes, I know.
And the government is the ruling power in each State?
Certainly.
And the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical,
with a view to their several interests; and these laws, which are made by them for their
own interests, are the justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who
transgresses them they punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust. And that is what I
mean when I say that in all States there is the same principle of justice, which is the
interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power,
the only reasonable conclusion is that everywhere there is one principle of justice, which
is the interest of the stronger.
Now I understand you, I said; and whether you are right or not I will try to discover. But
let me remark that in defining justice you have yourself used the word "interest," which
you forbade me to use. It is true, however, that in your definition the words "of the
stronger" are added.
A small addition, you must allow, he said.
Great or small, never mind about that: we must first inquire whether what you are saying
is the truth. Now we are both agreed that justice is interest of some sort, but you go on
to say "of the stronger"; about this addition I am not so sure, and must therefore
consider further.
Proceed.
I will; and first tell me, Do you admit that it is just for subjects to obey their rulers?
I do.
But are the rulers of States absolutely infallible, or are they sometimes liable to err?
To be sure, he replied, they are liable to err?
Then in making their laws they may sometimes make them rightly, and sometimes not?
True.
When they make them rightly, they make them agreeably to their interest; when they
are mistaken, contrary to their interest; you admit that?
Yes.
And the laws which they make must be obeyed by their subjects—and that is what you
call justice?
Doubtless.
Then justice, according to your argument, is not only obedience to the interest of the
stronger, but the reverse?
What is that you are saying? he asked.
I am only repeating what you are saying, I believe. But let us consider: Have we not
admitted that the rulers may be mistaken about their own interest in what they
command, and also that to obey them is justice? Has not that been admitted?
Yes.
Then you must also have acknowledged justice not to be for the interest of the stronger,
when the rulers unintentionally command things to be done which are to their own
injury. For if, as you say, justice is the obedience which the subject renders to their
commands, in that case, O wisest of men, is there any escape from the conclusion that
the weaker are commanded to do, not what is for the interest, but what is for the injury
of the stronger?
Nothing can be clearer, Socrates, said Polemarchus.
Yes, said Cleitophon, interposing, if you are allowed to be his witness.
But there is no need of any witness, said Polemarchus, for Thrasymachus himself
acknowledges that rulers may sometime command what is not for their own interest,
and that for subjects to obey them is justice.
Yes, Polemarchus—Thrasymachus said that for subjects to do what was commanded by
their rulers is just.
Yes, Cleitophon, but he also said that justice is the interest of the stronger, and, while
admitting both these propositions, he further acknowledged that the stronger may
command the weaker who are his subjects to do what is not for his own interest;
whence follows that justice is the injury quite as much as the interest of the stronger.
But, said Cleitophon, he meant by the interest of the stronger what the stronger thought
to be his interest—this was what the weaker had to do; and this was affirmed by him to
be justice.
Those were not his words, rejoined Polemarchus.
Never mind, I replied, if he now says that they are, let us accept his statement. Tell me,
Thrasymachus, I said, did you mean by justice what the stronger thought to be his
interest, whether really so or not?
Certainly not, he said. Do you suppose that I call him who is mistaken the stronger at the
time when he is mistaken?
Yes, I said, my impression was that you did so, when you admitted that the ruler was not
infallible, but might be sometimes mistaken.
You argue like an informer, Socrates. Do you mean, for example, that he who is mistaken
about the sick is a physician in that he is mistaken? or that he who errs in arithmetic or
grammar is an arithmetician or grammarian at the time when he is making the mistake,
in respect of the mistake? True, we say that the physician or arithmetician or
grammarian has made a mistake, but this is only a way of speaking; for the fact is that
neither the grammarian nor any other person of skill ever makes a mistake in so far as
he is what his name implies; they none of them err unless their skill fails them, and then
they cease to be skilled artists. No artist or sage or ruler errs at the time when he is what
his name implies; though he is commonly said to err, and I adopted the common mode
of speaking. But to be perfectly accurate, since you are such a lover of accuracy, we
should say that the ruler, in so far as he is a ruler, is unerring, and, being unerring,
always commands that which is for his own interest; and the subject is required to
execute his commands; and therefore, as I said at first and now repeat, justice is the
interest of the stronger.
Indeed, Thrasymachus, and do I really appear to you to argue like an informer?
Certainly, he replied.
And do you suppose that I ask these questions with any design of injuring you in the
argument?

The Complete Works of Plato - Part 3